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With "Chocolat," Denis makes her debut as a director, and she has designed the film so that politics and sex resonate off one another the movie is never about simply one idea or the other. In one scene, the whites go in search of a doctor for a guest suffering an epileptic seizure, and the shot in which a crowd of blacks emerges sheepishly from a church into the high-beamed glare of car headlights tells us everything we need to know about the coming revolts. I loved the way Denis draws her camera across the African landscape in order to make the countryside itself a character in the drama. But practically everything we learn in these scenes has been communicated earlier, through the languorous editing rhythms and the texture of Robert Alazraki's cinematography. When another visitor (Jean-Claude Adelin), an ex-seminarian on a walking tour across the continent, takes up residence, he begins to distort the rigid lines of conduct and protocol between the two classes - working with the black laborers and showering in their shower - and disrupts the delicate racial and political balance. The scenes featuring a group of travelers who move into the compound after their plane is forced to land carry us into territory overfamiliar from other stories about ruling colonials in foreign lands. The more explicit she becomes, the less she reveals. Whenever Denis resorts to a more conventional narrative, her touch is less assured. And, throughout, we're shown images - a donkey carcass, a gathering of vultures, a slice of bread covered with ants - that pull us deeper into the unconscious level where the movie works best. It conveys a world of crosscutting implications. A simple physical flourish - like the one Prote'e makes when he grabs Aime'e by the shoulders and pulls her to her feet after she strokes his leg - is like a passage from Balanchine. Throughout the picture, but particularly here, Denis' style owes as much to poetry and dance as it does to film. Staring at each other in the mirror, they look like figures from mythology, with defiance, anger and longing all passing between them in an instant. 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. 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.
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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.
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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.
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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