Chocolat: A Film Analysis Of The Film Choolat

Chocolat is a semi-autobiographical movie that drives as a political metaphor probing age, gender, and foreign interactions. Chocolat perceptively describes a young female’s return to her native home in Africa which invokes commemorations of French colonial life on a base in Cameroon in 1957. The movie is significant both because it’s depicted from the perspective of a female ex-colonizer and it is also Claire Denis’ first directorial.

This movie generally engrosses us in the suggestive mode of storytelling and conveyed with a dry sense of humor. Chocolat unwraps with a tranquility of the ocean, a motionless appearance that quickly transitions into a moving one. The movie’s renowned construction highlights the role of memory, allowing the

Silent reflection becomes an influential and extremely communicative space. The immense silence of West Africa directs the plot. Stylistically this is shown through long scenes panning the scarce West African backdrop. These scenes are marked by the lack of background music usually added to apologize for the nonexistence of sounds or dialogue you would expect to occur in a film. The extended scenes of a noiseless landscape run correspondingly to the silence equally shared by France and Protee, both France as a child; Protee as an African servant culturally, have no authority, influence or power. France and Protee used silence as an instrument in a common situation of incisive reflection. Their shared understanding was also accentuated by France’s quickly deliberated responses to Protee’s

In the wilderness, Protee makes a snack of live black ants on bread and butter for France, which she willingly consumes. France is a combination of African influences and French colonial. Described early in the movie, France’s diasporic identity is expressed in this scene. But in a scene later in the movie, France feeds Protee soup setting at the table in the house. This sense of friendship is ruined when Protee eats a live insect at the table and France, exemplifying a colonial voice, ridicules him as a repulsive native. The contradictory colonial powers that have marked Africa are entertainingly signified through food. Aimee fights with the African cook to prepare French food instead of his customary English meals. Instantly afterward an old English colonist calls in and Aimee is found pleading the cook to go back to making the traditional English