In 1959, the French village of Lansquenet is a tidy, quiet place where pious decorum reigns, where the social highlight is Sunday Mass and the most popular civic activity is behaving oneself.
Many of the residents -- especially the close-minded mayor who monitors his citizens for their own good -- boast of the town's "tranquillity.'' Others of a rebellious bent think in terms of repression.
Then, one day, a cold wind blows into town, and with it comes a mysterious woman and her daughter. They immediately set about launching a seditious counterattack against Lansquenet's stuffy atmosphere, armed with a weapon of devastating potential: chocolate.
Not just a few Hershey's bars, mind you, but chocolate in every conceivable shape and blend, mixed with potent allies such as nuts, cherries and cream, and given blatantly suggestive names such as Nipples of Venus.
Chocolat is presented as a fairy tale, complete with "Once upon a time'' at the top of the first page. But the French-set, English-language comedy has a real-world purpose: to attack repression, dismiss self-discipline and ridicule conservative behavior (with a sideswipe at that insidious institution, organized religion).
Like many fairy tales, the movie from director Lasse Hallstrom (The Cider House Rules) has no use for debates, ambiguity or gray areas. Townsfolk who surrender to the pleasures of sweets are good; those who don't are bad and may be redeemed only by giving in.
That the liberal viewpoint is as dogmatic as the conservative dictates it condemns does not seem to have occurred to those who made the movie. Irony is out. Pass the semisweet kisses.
The top-drawer cast gives the characters a false veneer of complexity. For example, the town malcontent is Armande, an old woman whose snooty daughter disapproves of Mother's bohemian style and won't let the old woman see her grandson. Armande is a caricature of the crusty but lovable senior citizen who tickles the audience with occasional vulgarisms.
But Armande is played by Judi Dench, the Oscar-winning British actress, and so the old woman seems more dimensional than if she had been played by Cloris Leachman.
Proven heavyweights such as Lena Olin, Peter Stromare, Leslie Caron and, in a small role, Johnny Depp, give all their arresting presence to one-note characters, while former model Carrie-Anne Moss swings 180 degrees from her sexy turn in The Matrix to play Armande's stuck-up daughter.
Leading the cast is the always- provocative Juliette Binoche as Vianne, the temptress in the teapot who dangles her high-calorie confections like a drug dealer at a jet-set party. Binoche gives the role a hint of melancholy: Vianne is prone to packing up her daughter and moving on for no reason. That rootlessness is supposed to make Vianne seem complex, but it proves a minor wrinkle quickly resolved.
Surprisingly, the only character who hints at internal conflict is the lead villain, the mayor, nicely played by Alfred Molina. At times, the town's voice of enforced piety struggles to control private demons and broods over the secret knowledge that his rigidity probably drove his wife away.
That complexity doesn't last, though. The mayor soon plays his designated role as snarling oppressor whose only redemption can come by giving in to the liberating forces of exotic candy.
Chocolat is a feel-good art film, more sophisticated than a formula mainstream movie but just as narrowly conceived and calculated.
The biggest surprise is that it doesn't inspire the gnawing hunger that came with such culinary epics as Like Water for Chocolate, Big Night and Babette's Feast. Then again, I'm not a big chocolate fan; true chocoholics may leave convinced they've just seen the greatest movie since Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory.
Thanks to Mike Kennedy for sending this review which appeared in the Columbus Dispatch on December 22, 2000.