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Chocolat (1988 film)

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Wikipedia article




'Chocolat' is a 1988 film directed by Claire Denis, about a French family that lives in colonial Cameroon. Marc and Aime Dalens (Franois Cluzet and Giulia Boschi) are the parents of France (Ccile Ducasse), a young girl who befriends Prote (Isaach de Bankol), a Cameroon native who is the family's household servant. The film was entered into the 1988 Cannes Film Festival.

Plot



An adult woman named France walks down a road toward Douala, Cameroon. She is picked up by William J. Park (Emmet Judson Williamson), an African American who has moved to Africa and is driving to Limbe with his son. As they ride, France's mind drifts and we see her as a young girl in Mindif, French Cameroon in 1957, where her father was a colonial administrator.

The story is told through the eyes of young France, showing her friendship with the "houseboy," Prote, as well the sexual tension between him and her young and beautiful mother, Aime. The conflict of the film comes from the discomfort created as France and her mother attempt to move past the established boundaries between themselves and the native Africans. This is brought to a head through Luc Segalen (Jean-Claude Adelin), a Western drifter who stays with the Dalens family after a small aircraft crashes nearby. He acknowledges Aime's attraction to Prote in the presence of other black servants. This later results in a fight between Luc and Prote, which Prote wins. During the fight, Aime sits nearby, unseen by the two. She attempts to seduce Prote after Luc has left but he rejects her advance. Aime consequently asks her husband to remove him from the house. Prote is moved from his in-house job to working outdoors in the garage as a mechanic.

The title 'Chocolat' (, "chocolate") comes from the 1950s slang meaning "to be cheated," and thus refers to the status in French Cameroon of being black and being cheated; it is also an allusion to Prote's dark-brown skin and the racial fetishism of Africans by Europeans. Towards the end of the film, France's father reveals a central theme of the film as he explains to her what the horizon is. He tells her that it is a line that is there but not there, a symbol for the boundaries that exist in the country between rich and poor, master and servant, white and black, coloniser and colonised, male and female; a line that is always visible but impossible to approach or pass.

Cast



* Isaach de Bankol as Prote

* Giulia Boschi as Aime Dalens

* Franois Cluzet as Marc Dalens

* Ccile Ducasse as France Dalens, as a girl

* Mireille Perrier as France Dalens, as a woman

* Jean-Claude Adelin as Luc

* Laurent Arnal as Machinard

* Jean Bediebe as Prosper

* Didier Flamand as Captain Vdrine

* Jean-Quentin Chtelain as Courbassol

* Emmanuelle Chaulet as Mireille Machinard

* Kenneth Cranham as Jonathan Boothby

* Jacques Denis as Joseph Delpich

* Clementine Essono as Marie-Jeanne

* Essindi Mindja as Blaise

Soundtrack



The soundtrack, performed and recorded by Abdullah Ibrahim, was released in 1988 as 'Mindif'.

References




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