Chocolat

A film set in Cameroon in the colonial period. A woman returns to the country after many years. She lives in France and wants to see where her childhood was spent. The narrative goes back. France is a small girl. Her father is the district administrator, her mother is at home, and the family lives alone in a house in an empty place. Protée is the houseboy. Young, measured, doing every task, and the child spends her days with him. The two are friends. But the limits of the relationship are set and neither of them names it. From there the film comes down into daily life. Preparing a meal, a shower, a walk, a table and arriving guests. An aircraft breaks down. A group of Europeans stay at the house and one of them is openly rude to the servants. Something happens between the mother and Protée. One night she asks something of him; he refuses. The next day Protée is not let into the house. He is sent to the store and never comes inside again. What the narrative is interested in is not love but power: the film does not build the relationship as a romance; what it really describes is one side being able to end everything the moment it chooses. The scene with the pipe is the film's last move. Protée teaches the child a lesson and the mark is permanent. The narrative speaks very little. The scenes are long, the dialogue sparse, and the landscape constantly in frame. This is Claire Denis's first feature and draws on her own childhood; she grew up in Africa as the child of a family working in the French colonial administration. Isaach de Bankolé, Giulia Boschi, François Cluzet and Cécile Ducasse are in the cast. Claire Denis directed and co-wrote. Who it is for: anyone who likes slow films built on observation and indirect narratives about colonialism. Who it is not for: anyone expecting incident; the film is almost entirely daily life and turns around a single event.