This sensual breakthrough of Claire Dennis, Chocolat follows a white family’s struggles during the last years of France’s African colonies in the 1950s, exploring the intricate nature of power and relationships in a colonial society. In a remote Cameroon town, husband Marc and wife Aimee live with their young daughter, the curious and observant France, who forges a friendship with Cameroonian servant Protee. Their home’s exterior beauty hides Aimee’s frustrations and boredom and Protee’s noble, silent tolerance of day-to-day indignities. When a plane makes an emergency landing nearby, the family’s neatly ordered world is suddenly threatened with chaos, the motley collection of new arrivals forcing the idyllic façade to dissolve, unleashing a tidal wave of forbidden passions, rage, resentment and racist attitudes that threaten to tear the family apart.
- DIRECTOR: CLAIRE DENIS
- STARRING: ISAACH DE BANKOLÉ, GIULIA BOSCHI, FRANÇOIS CLUZET, JEAN-CLAUDE ADELIN, LAURENT ARNAL
- FRANCE
- 1988
- 105 MINS
- RATING – 15
£6.00 (£4.50 conc.)
Doors 6:00PM
Film 6:30PM
“Amazingly assured… Clare Denis draws out the implications of the action with great subtlety”
“Erotic, sophisticated, and distinctive”
“Denis quickly immerses us in her voluptuous, allusive mode of storytelling… What’s most remarkable about Chocolat, Denis’s first feature, is the degree to which her superb command of the sensuous is already apparent”
“Remarkable and quietly devastating”
“Extraordinary”