On another, she invites him into the bedroom to help lace up the back of her dress. On one occasion, Aime'e asks Prote'e to stand guard over the bed where she and her daughter sleep to protect them from a rampaging hyena.
#Chocolat filmi movie#
After Marc embarks on an expedition, leaving the two of them virtually alone, the movie becomes a solemn courtship, with neither participant sure of his role. But the prideful flare of Bankole''s nostrils signals his sense of superiority, and it's clear that Denis means to present him as a different kind of ideal - as an icon of self-determination.Īctually, he is both, and this duality is the source of the sexual power games between mistress and servant. With his classical handsomeness and powerful, lithe physique, he might be merely an idealized love object. Smooth-skinned and ebony-dark, Prote'e has the bearing of a young black god. There's a charge hanging in the air, in the trees. But in Denis' hands, the continent itself seems to have been eroticized. Most of the subliminal vibrations emanate from Prote'e, whose presence seems to have a destabilizing effect on Aime'e.
And what she appears to have remembered most are the sexual tensions that infest nearly every action, every encounter. Her most vivid memories are woven into her physical perceptions of the place, from the look and feel of things. The director herself spent time in Africa as a child, and the images she provides have an autobiographical burnish - they're felt images. The relationship between young France (Ce'cile Ducasse) and the servant is the movie's focal point, and with the exception of the riddles the man offers to the child, their rapport is virtually wordless - a dialogue of exchanged glances and understandings.
Watching the scenery flash by from a car window, France (Mireille Perrier) is drawn back into her memories of an earlier time when she rode through the countryside with her mother and father, Aime'e (Giulia Boschi) and Marc (Franc ois Cluzet), and their houseboy, Prote'e (Isaach de Bankole'). Set mostly in the West African colony of Cameroon in the late '50s, during the final years of French control, the movie emerges out of the recollections of a young French woman who returns to Cameroon, where years ago her father worked as a district deputy. Not a lot happens in "Chocolat," but a great deal is implied. The movie is like sex for the eyes - it's ravishing in a way that goes straight into your blood. Watching Claire Denis' "Chocolat," you feel as if your senses have been quickened, reawakened. Children under 13 should be accompanied by a parent
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