MOVIE REVIEW : A Bittersweet ‘Chocolat’

In her first film, “Chocolat” (at the Nuart Friday), co-writer/director Claire Denis, who has worked closely with Jim Jarmusch and Wim Wenders, treasures the elliptical and the allusive. She makes her portrait of 1950s white French colonials in black Cameroon out of fragments, snapshots ragged at the edge, snippets of observation.

“Chocolat” is a film of some subtlety. It has good, even memorable moments to it, and it’s beautiful looking. It is very, very, very French, which may or may not be your cup of chocolat. It is also a suffocatingly precious film, enough to try the patience of an oyster, and one that primly refuses to detonate the mounting numbers of erotic situations it sets up.

That is precisely Denis’ way; to do otherwise would clearly be a vulgarity in her eyes. Yet it may have an opposite effect. By denying her black central character, Protee, any outlet for the sexual rage and humiliation building up in him, instead of the statement Denis imagines she is making, she actually takes away his humanity. He becomes ennobled, pure and beautiful as a living statue and as objectified.

The film is one long flashback, a truncated, brooding return to the places of her childhood by a reflective adult, France Dalens (Mireille Perrier). Her reveries as she speeds across this shimmering landscape move her back roughly 25 years, to when her youngish father, Marc Dalens (Francois Cluzet) was the colonial district officer for the area. (Cluzet is familiar to Americans as Dexter Gordon’s stalwart French fan in “ ‘Round Midnight.”)

His position provides Dalens and his beautiful, tensed-up wife, Aimee (Giulia Boschi), with a big, pleasant house, soldiers under Dalens’ command and a house staff, including the enormously capable African “boy” Protee (Isaach de Bankole), frequently in charge of the house during Dalens’ excursions.

Protee and the 7-year-old France (Cecile Ducasse), an observant child, mostly silent under her little straw helmet, spend most of their time together in mutual invisibility. They are friends, although as Denis, who co-wrote the screenplay with Jean-Pol Fargeau, sees France, the child is already an imperious little white colonial too. Frankly, it doesn’t leave us many people to give a tinker’s damn about. Marc Dalens, who loves the country and possibly even its people and is prescient enough to know that the French will not be astride it forever, is the best of the bunch but he’s not the world’s most charismatic leader.

It might help if the film makers let us in on the Dalenses’ relationship. Mostly, lonely, bored mamman smokes, drinks endless cups of espresso and alternately yearns for and is imperious toward Protee. (Boschi was Christopher Lambert’s bride in “The Sicilian,” and the jury is still out on whether her attitudes constitute acting but she certainly is decorative.)

About a third of the way into the film, the emergency landing of a small plane brings its passengers to the Dalens household, while mechanical parts are sent for and a runway is built. They are, in varying degrees, a loathsome bunch, arrogant and condescending, with an ingrained, unearned sense of superiority. The foulmouthed, bullying coffee planter, Delpich (Jacques Denis), seems the worst of the lot. Then, in the film’s best scene, as Delpich lounges under a canvas with a few of the men after their noontime meal, he unexpectedly sings a refrain from a childhood song. Coming from such a despicable soul, his voice is unexpectedly sweet and poignant; it’s a surprising, humanizing moment.

Actually, the most dangerous guest is Luc Segalen (Jean-Claude Adelin), a muscular ex-seminarian currently walking across the continent, who prides himself on truth-telling and a “simple” way of life more native than that of the natives. More precisely, he’s a sexual predator who has already cut a considerable swath among the French ladies at one after another remote outpost. Anyone with a good memory for the ‘70s will recognize Segalen; he’s a variation on the earnest young Americans who became more Indian than the Navajos; more peaceable than Gandhi. Today they are commodities traders and movie producers.

“Chocolat” is a compendium of telling moments, so self-consciously pointed that they form a connect-the-dots map of colonialism. What makes it a bore is that audiences are encouraged to think that by picking up these vast, looming clues, they are on to something deep.

Jarmusch works in fragments, too, but they finally lead to something, and his films have a buoyancy that comes from his bushwhacking humor. Denis is cautious, joyless, as though she regarded levity from her film’s few possible comic moments or characters (Segalen is one) as inappropriate to the toniness of her message. So the film’s natural light moments are stifled.

“Chocolat” broods, it teases with consummate adroitness, then it skitters away from confrontation. (The film is MPAA rated PG-13 for brief nudity.) It has no driving rhythm to it, only nicely captured moments in isolation. In a slightly different context, Denis has called her film “suffused with a sense of frustration.” Audiences may agree with her completely.

‘CHOCOLAT’

An Orion Classics Release of a Cinemanuel/Marin Karmitz--MK2 Productions/Cerito Films/Wim Wenders Produktion/La S.E.P.T./Caroline Productions/Le F.O.D.I.C./TFI Films Production co-production, with the participation of the Centre National de la Cinematographie and Sofica Sofima. Executive producers Alain Belmondo, Gerard Crosnier. Associate producers Samuel Mabom, Pierre Ilouga Mabout. Director Claire Denis. Screenplay Denis, Jean-Pol Fargeau. Camera Robert Alazraki. Art director Thierry Flamand. Sound Jean-Louis Ughetto, Dominique Hennequin. Editor Claude Merlin. Music Abdullah Ibrahim. With Isaach de Bankole, Giulia Boschi, Francois Cluzet, Cecile Ducasse, Jean-Claude Adelin, Jacques Denis, Didier Flamand, Mireille Perrier, Donatus Ngala.

Running time: 1 hour, 45 minutes.

MPAA-rated: PG-13 (parents strongly cautioned; some material may be inappropriate for children younger than 13).