![]() But here she is let down by having to play the ineffably smug part of Vianne, a free-spirited woman who turns up in an uptight French town in the late 1950s. Her grace, beauty and intelligence are subjects on which I have descanted in the past, and to which I shall return when Michael Haneke's Code Unknown is released later this year. Only a churl would not feel his heart lift at the sight of the star, Juliette Binoche. It certainly suggests that filling your face with chocolate is a richly joyous, warmly sensual, life-affirming and above all giving experience - and in itself a devastating rebuke to the tyrannies of the Roman Catholic church. Hallstrom turns the feelgood bestseller by British author Joanne Harris into what looks like a two-hour version of one of those TV ads targeted patronisingly at the female consumer, coyly suggesting that chocolate is the new sex, or maybe that sex is the new chocolate. Watching this very self-conscious comedy-romance is a bit like being forced to eat a Thornton's factory out of business.Ĭhocolat is directed by Lasse Hallstrom, the man who in The Cider House Rules took the themes of racial prejudice and sexual abuse and suffused them in a weirdly benign glow. T his is a gooey, sticky, mushy, sickly-sweet confection of a movie it tastes much more like the dairy milk chocolate proffered to the uneducated Gump-ish palates of Britain and America than the dark, bitter substance preferred by the discerning French.
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