I just rented and watched "Chocolat" for the umpteenth time. I also just finished drinking a cup of hot chocolate. Wonder why. "Chocolat" is not a new movie, copyright year being 2000 on the VHS tape I rented. (The video store didn’t have it on DVD. Wonder why.)
This movie touches so many emotions...happiness, sadness, pity, anger...AND I am supremely tempted by all the chocolate. Throughout the movie chocolate abounds. Thankfully they haven’t invented smellivision yet or I would be undone! It doesn’t help that Johnny Depp shows up midway through the plot line either. Intelligent moviemakers know if they’re going to make a movie about temptation, their leading man’s just gotta be Johnny Depp.
The story takes place in a straightlaced French village in 1959. Vianne, a stranger, drifts into town and opens a chocolate shop at the beginning of Lent, drawing the contempt of the mayor, who strives desperately to keep everyone under his thumb and to make sure everyone attends Mass and strictly keeps all his rules, which are not necessarily God’s. The mayor seems to think that obeying religious rules is the most important thing in life. With him it’s the letter of the law, not the spirit of the law. Heck, going to church doesn’t make you a Christian any more than standing in a carport makes you a Ferrari.
Vianne and her little girl, however, are not churchgoers, but they do try to make friends, only to discover that the mayor has warned the village to leave them alone as he feels they are a bad influence. Stop right there. Wouldn’t the Christian thing have been to try to befriend Vianne and her daughter and win them to Jesus Christ instead of shunning them? Wouldn’t the wrong thing be to turn the entire village against them?
If we could become Christians (or be won to Jesus Christ or get into Heaven or whatever you want to call it) through being good and doing good works, then in this movie the non-churchgoing Vianne would have made it hands down, her few indiscretions notwithstanding. She befriended an old lady whose daughter had forbidden her little boy to see his grandmother and brought them together secretly (okay, that would have made me mad had I been his mother, but Vianne’s heart was right,) she saw a bad marriage and sheltered the battered woman, she helped heal another bad marriage, she saw an older man’s feelings for a widow still mourning her husband after 15 years and Cupidized them, and she accepted the dregs of society just as they were (reminds me of an old hymn.) All using the temptation of chocolate. (Hey, it’s a movie! Gimme a break.)
With God, it’s always a heart thing. And Vianne’s heart was for helping. I don’t know that she ever accepted Jesus Christ as her Savior, thereby becoming a Christian, and thereby going to Heaven, but her example far and away surpassed that of the pious mayor, who gossiped and judged and lived in denial of the truth, on several matters, and demanded perfection. Even God knows we’re not perfect. The Bible may say, "Be perfect as I am perfect," but He knows that’s unattainable on this earth; it’s just something to strive for till we get to Heaven, where all is perfect.
Hollywood’s perennial tolerance agenda was thinly veiled in this piece, and there were times when I wanted to just throw something at the TV, but Hollywood is made up of humans, and there is never going to be a perfect movie. I haven’t seen one yet, nor do I suspect I ever will. However, I am pleased every time I watch "Chocolat" and don’t see the lewdness and hear the repeated foul language that seem to be spewing from almost every movie hitting the screens these days. Refreshing.
Is "Chocolat" the best movie ever made? No. Is it the best-acted movie ever made? No. Is it the most thrilling movie ever made? No. In fact, there are few thrills. But it will make you think, which says something for it as far as I’m concerned. Usually movies are very superficial to me. I take them at face value, most of the time. I watch them for the entertainment value, not to write an English Lit. book report on alliteration and allegory and foreshadowing. As a Christian, this one made me think, and I almost always look at things from the Christian perspective. This one's a thinker.
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