It creates an intersubjective space and atmosphere thick with a certain mood.

The particular minimalist style of the film captures this tension of an unspoken and impossible desire that lingers between the characters Aimee and Protee in a truly fascinating way. It is at the very moment of experiencing these feelings of desire and love, and the resulting impossibility of fulfilling that love, that the complicating and restricting presence of colonialism is most acutely made aware. The contradiction between the diverse facets of their relationship points to the problematic nature of colonialism, which must always construct its worldview according to the master/slave opposition.Ĭhocolat explores the idea that despite this opposition, feelings of desire and love will emerge that subsequently problematise relations. The paradigm of master and slave is also most visible during those moments where France sits at the table eating while Protee stands beside her, extremely upright and ready at her command. This is most evident in the scene where France, sitting on a horse holding a whip, commands Protee to stop conversing with the African school teacher and leave with her immediately. Although Protee and the young France share a friendship of interdependency and understanding, it is still one subject to the defining relations of domination and subordination. The presence of colonialism in Chocolat is revealed with great subtlety. Through such ‘refractory characters’, Chocolat explores the very subtle workings of desire and power between people. They are less characters, as we conventionally understand this term, than shifting configurations of mood, bodily disposition, facial expression. They are constituted, fragilely, in a succession of moments, moments of feeling, sensation, intellection. The very nature of these mysterious and elusive characters whom the spectator must work hard to understand and know results in what Adrian Martin calls, ‘refractory characters’: Rather, Chocolat proceeds according to a lyrical rhythm, where the characters are present in their bodily movement, gesture, expression and minimal dialogue. What is ‘spoken’ in the film between the characters is not expressed in conventional film language of narrative dialogue, action or event. The minimal exchanges between characters and their unspoken feelings of dependency, desire and intimacy is expressed throughout the film in the tableaux-like composition that dominates its style and the silent, observant and calculated regard of the camera. The film refuses to present a reality in which characters are polarised as either good or bad, oppressor or victim instead it dramatises colonial relations as complex, ambiguous and intricate. Chocolat explores the subtle and discreet workings of power, desire, betrayal and dependency in colonial inter-relationships. Rather, it speaks through what Adrian Martin calls a ‘melancholic postmodernism’ in which nothing is ever completely resolved or known (1). Through its understated style and narrative Chocolat does not attempt to make any grand statements of the colonial past. France reflects back to her childhood in a colonial setting and her family situation, which includes her father, Marc, a colonial administrator, her mother, Aimee, and their ‘Boy’, Protee. The film begins in the postcolonial present before the flashback of a French woman named France commences, which becomes the bulk of the film. As a white French film director, Denis explores and examines her country and its troubled history and identity from a colonial context. It is within this postcolonial moment of reflection, that a film such as Chocolat can be contextualised. It provides a moment of liberation insofar as it enables the recognition of precolonial ‘culture’ and ‘language’, and a moment to reformulate identity and experience not based on Western Eurocentric discourses. Postcolonialism involves a process of reflecting, re-assembling and remembering the colonial and pre-colonial past. The contemporary French film, Chocolat (Claire Denis, 1988), can be seen to be somewhat informed, thematically and formally, by this broad contemporary sensibility.

It emphasizes the local, the specific and difference, and the idea that no one can speak unilaterally for another. It involves a deconstruction of ‘grand narratives’ of history, modernisation and progress, and a recognition and celebration of difference and ‘unspoken’ narratives. Postcolonialism is a contemporary sensibility, which in general terms, foregrounds elements of difference, heterogeneity and pluralism.

Movie chocolat