Claire Denis (b. 1948 Paris, France) began her filmmaking career as assistant to several important and influential directors. She has worked with everyone from Jacques Rivette (Out 1 (1971)), to Costa-Gavras (Hanna K. (1983)), to Wim Wenders (Paris, Texas (1984)) and Jim Jarmusch (Down by Law (1986)). As has become evident from her subsequent career as a world-class director in her own right, Denis possesses a keen sensitivity to detail and gesture and an almost preternatural ability to illuminate the subtle, almost subliminal lines of emotional force that usually pass unnoticed between human beings. And so one must imagine that she spent these crucial years of apprenticeship largely soaking up the ambient crackle of artistic energy swirling around her, taking it all in, imbuing her very bones with the skills necessary to one day bring forth and project her own depths upon the screen. It is tempting to envision her there on set, brilliant eyes ablaze with a fierce intelligence, a bit removed perhaps; a strange young woman, quiet, rarely speaking, but noticing everything. In other words, much like the character of France Dalens (Cécile Ducasse as a young girl; Mireille Perrier as her older self), protagonist (of a sort) of Denis’ feature length debut, Chocolat (1988).
Scene one, shot one is a freeze frame on a beach, waves arrested, horizon line bisecting the image. The somber skies and muted tones are almost grayscale in their neutrality, reminiscent of black-and-white film. For anyone even glancingly familiar with the history of French cinema, the final shot of François Truffaut’s The 400 Blows (Les Quatre Cents Coups (1959)) can’t help but spring immediately to mind. It is as if Denis is staking her claim with this opening salvo, effectively saying to her audience, “Look: the Nouvelle vague is past; welcome to the new New Wave.” While Denis’ cinema will not be as formally radical as those of her forebears, nevertheless her work will prove itself to be just as daring, albeit in less flashy ways. Hers will be a cinema of slippages, of boundaries being penetrated – boundaries of race and culture, of gender, of the body. In fact the horizon line itself will prove to be the overarching metaphor at play in Chocolat – a boundary that is both there and not there, seemingly definitive, yet ever-retreating the more one attempts to approach.
Soon two distant figures appear from the waves, frolicking in the sand. They are quietly observed from afar by a young woman sitting off by herself, smoking a cigarette. This is France, a white woman, maybe mid-20s, and we are on a near-empty beach in post-colonial Cameroon, Africa, in the mid-to-late ‘70s (although to be honest, the timelines here are indistinct, blurred). As the camera cuts from a shot of France’s face back to the beach, we at first assume we’ll be seeing another shot from her POV – i.e., that the first shot of the film was also from her perspective and that this next one will continue along the standard, shot-counter-shot narrative line. However, Denis immediately subverts our expectations, giving us instead an overhead shot of a young Black boy, beautifully photographed by cinematographer Robert Alazraki, lounging in the surf. Cut to a three-quarters view of the same scene, this time with his father in view, relaxing next to his son. Only then do we revert back to the previous shot of France’s gaze.
As all serious works of art contain within them a key to their interpretation, so too with Chocolat. Denis here seems to be giving to her audience a clue as to what her project will be. While this post-colonial film about a French colonial past will have everything to do with borders, with differences, with power differentials between those who can only view each other from a great distance, if at all, it will also contain scenes of sudden rupture, wherein great distances are traversed in a single moment and other, heretofore unthought of views on the situation can be obtained. A new angle, so to speak – a shot from above.
Moreover, this opening scene of Chocolat encapsulates the overall structure of the film to come. The story is bracketed by scenes of France as an adult, traveling through Cameroon and reminiscing about her childhood spent there in the area of Mindif, where her father, Marc Dalens (François Cluzet), served as colonial governor. In the bulk of the film, France is a young girl of maybe seven or eight, ever on the periphery of the scene, observing with wide eyes her parents’ interactions with the native population; the unthinking cruelty of those who deem themselves decent. The bookended shots of the adult France offer angles on the beach she could never have obtained from her vantage, thus cueing the audience into the existence of a point-of-view that transcends those of the film’s characters – that of the director herself, whose real-life history mirrors to some extent that of France’s. So too does the flashback sequence contain numerous scenes in which France is not present. And thus, what seems at first to be a simple bildungsroman becomes problematized under Denis’ direction, yielding towards an open-ended narrative with no easy resolutions; neither to the larger, collective French narrative of colonial misadventure nor of France’s (and by extension, Claire Denis’) personal storyline – both are in the end effaced.
The physical, spiritual and emotional center of the film is Protée, one of the Dalens family’s many “houseboys.” Given a superbly astute and raw performance by the great Ivorian actor, Isaach De Bankolé, Protée’s flawed relationships with both the young France (tender, loving, a little distant, cruel) and her mother, Aimée (Giulia Boschi) are at the core of the film’s drama. The sexual tension between Aimée and Protée is so subtly depicted as to appear abstract – not for Claire Denis are the usual stolen glances and lingering caresses of more typical Hollywood fare. The audience is clued in only through juxtaposition, editing choices, the odd indirect innuendo, so that when the sudden revelation of Aimée’s desire finally arises, the audience is as surprised as she is.
But of course she cannot allow herself to feel anything but self-hatred for wanting to be with a man she does not consider to be a man, whom she cannot look directly in the eye and who represents for her this entire continent she so obviously loathes. She at all times appears as if she’d rather be at a cocktail party back in France than anywhere near the West Coast of Africa. She is an outsider who came into this man’s home (his country, his land) and made him feel like an outsider in hers.
The theme of “outsiderness,” of “otherness” is ever-present in Chocolat. It is a film about the insidious evil of white supremacy which causes nothing but alienation and suffering for both the victim and the perpetrator on both a national and a personal level. And yet it is also a film of understated beauty, depicting the country and its people with a great deal of tender respect and care; a familiarity born from experience. Claire Denis’ upbringing in French colonial Africa, as a child of colonialist oppressors, an outsider amongst the alienated, has obviously spawned within her a great desire to empathize with the loner, with the damaged, with the oppressed and unloved. Chocolat, as well as her subsequent oeuvre, has made it clear that she is a great artist who is more than aware that nothing is clear; that ambiguity reigns in all arenas of life and that every barrier to connection is both real and not real, historical and personal and in-between, like the sun disappearing below the horizon on the shimmering plains of Africa.
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