Hallstrom couldn’t have asked for a better cast to embody those themes likewise, his production team has done an exquisite job of giving life to Robert Nelson Jacobs’ taut script.ĭavid Gropman’s well-conceived production design illustrates the evolution of Lansquenet from a moribund, monochrome village to a newly upbeat town infused with color and light, beautifully captured in Roger Pratt’s lens. Though Vianne is clearly the heroine, the Comte, who believes he is doing good, is not altogether villainous. Brimming with dualities, it pairs themes of feast with fasting and Christian tradition against pagan rituals. The film, finally, is about having the power to change, to accept others regardless of their differences. Being a Hallstrom film, however, “Chocolat” tempers the bitter with the sweet. Roux and his band of reprobates are, to the Comte, a moral abomination about whom “something must be done.”įinal act involves a narrowly averted disaster that nearly runs Vianne out of town. This tension accounts for a number of comic moments involving parishioners’ guilty confessions about their lust for chocolate to the young priest (Hugh O’Conor), who is himself - gasp - an Elvis Presley fan.įed up with the Comte’s self-righteousness, Vianne decides to inflame existing tensions by taking up with the roguish Roux (Johnny Depp), an Irish gypsy who arrives in town with a ragtag guitar-strumming crew.

Along with Armande, Vianne finds a friend in the initially skittish Josephine (Lena Olin), the long-suffering wife of the town’s boorish cafe proprietor (Peter Stormare).īut even as some of the townsfolk begin to trust Vianne, others think she is doing the devil’s work, prompting the indignant Comte de Reynaud to declare a moral war on Vianne and her chocolate shop. Vianne’s confections even enable the once-grumpy Armande to mend a rift with the grandson (Aurelien Parent Koenig) her estranged daughter (Carrie-Anne Moss) has forbidden her to see. Her blend of culinary magic and intuition soon restores the zing in one couple’s sex life and helps an elderly gentleman (John Wood) find the courage to court a widow (Leslie Caron) he has admired from afar. Though wary of the outsider’s presence, they are lured, one by one, by her shop’s delectable scents and visual pleasures, and are delightedly surprised by Vianne’s instinct for guessing her customers’ favorite chocolates. Splashed with color and Mayan ceramics, the shop has the decor, sniffs elderly dowager Armande Voizin (Judi Dench), of an “early Mexican brothel.” And while she’s hardly a madam, Vianne soon exerts a mysterious influence over the townspeople. It will, in fact, be something much worse: a chocolate shop, the likes of which Lansquenet has never seen.

Not to worry, the rosy-cheeked Vianne informs him cheerily, it’s not going to be a pastry shop. Vianne leases the patisserie during Lent, a plan that the town’s mayor and guardian of morality, the Comte de Reynaud (Alfred Molina), insists is nothing short of sacrilege.

As resistant to change as their village once was to medieval warriors, these are folk whose abiding principle is tranquilite - a tranquillity that depends on maintaining Christian traditions of abstinence, penitence and moral righteousness.Īnd when the blustery north wind blows into town, bringing with it the red-hooded, unwed mother Vianne Rocher (the quietly radiant Juliette Binoche) and her young daughter Anouk (Victoire Thivisol), nothing could be a greater threat to the status quo. Hallstrom makes that point with deft economy in pic’s opening moments: A sweeping aerial shot of the isolated town yields to images of dowdy villagers on their way to Mass.

Set in France in the late 1950s, story opens in the fictional hamlet of Lansquenet, a medieval village unchanged for centuries.

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