More Emotion Than Food, Chocolate Does Well on Film

Chocolate, in all its seductive and even magical glory, has long been a popular topic in movies. Using it as a delicious treat and a metaphor for earthly temptations, filmmakers often cover chocolate with fanciful confections and bittersweet contemplations.

The latest is director Lasse Hallstrom’s “Chocolat,” a sweet fable about a woman, Vianne Rocher (Juliette Binoche), who blows into an isolated French village with her daughter in tow and opens a chocolaterie. Based on Joanne Harris’ novel of the same name, the movie uses chocolate to symbolize the liberating powers of pleasure.

Vianne dispenses chocolates as therapy, finding the right candy cure for each person and disturbing the self-righteous Comte de Reynaud (Alfred Molina) with this devilish decadence. Reynaud uses his influence on the young new priest (Hugh O’Conor) to make his crusade against Vianne a religious matter.

Harris isn’t the only one who thinks chocolate can be revealing. In his book “Chocolate Therapy: Dare to Discover Your Inner Center,” New Zealand hypnotherapist Murray Langham states that the chocolate shapes you choose, the centers you like reveal the inner workings of your mind, your character traits and sexual habits.

Chocolate has a rich history outside the movies. Cacao beans, the basis for chocolate, were used by the Aztecs and Mayans as a form of currency. Brought to Europe, the cacao tree soon began to work its magic. Duly impressed, Swedish naturalist Linnaeus gave it the botanical name Theobroma cacao or “food of the gods.”

Chocolate has been a source of intrigue--cacao beans were once smuggled into countries and chocolate’s heavy taste masked bitter poisons. At the cinema, in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1936 “Secret Agent,” a Swiss chocolate factory was used as a message center for German spies.

More often, chocolate in the movies has been a love offering as in 1941’s “The Chocolate Soldier,” in which chocolate was simply a bonbon exchanged between two bickering spouses (Nelson Eddy and Rise Stevens).

Experts say that chocolate in all its forms is particularly appealing to women. Julie Felss, a senior market manager for the Belgium-based Godiva Chocolatier (the official chocolate of “Chocolat”), noted that its customers are mostly women--except on Valentine’s Day, when the customers are predominately men.

Michael Schneider, editor and publisher of Chocolatier magazine, concurred, saying, “Chocolate addiction is a female thing. . . . Chocolate is the most popular food among women. Among men, it’s pizza.” Schneider also noted that his readership is 87% female.

So it’s hardly surprising that a recent Canadian film about women and their love relationships would be called “Better Than Chocolate.” On the brink of another divorce, one character declares, “And since I probably won’t be having sex again, chocolate is the only pleasure left me.”

Schneider noted that with the growing popularity in the U.S. of European-style chocolates, the image of the sweet has become more upscale. Still, in America, attitudes tend to place chocolate as a guilty pleasure because of dietary reasons. Yet in the movies, he noted, “Chocolate has always been treated as an emotion and not as a food.”

In the 1992 Mexican movie based on Laura Esquivel’s novel, food was emotion and the frustrated lovers’ passions boiled “Like Water for Chocolate.” Perhaps more than any of the other chocolate-related movies, the magical realism of Alfonso Arau’s movie matches “Chocolat” in its fanciful fairy-tale tone.

In “Chocolat,” Vianne says, “Chocolate, I am told, is not a moral issue,” but in fact chocolate has been used to explore societal ills. In the 1988 French-language movie also named “Chocolat,” chocolate is the skin color of a separate world in a West African French colony in which whites hold the upper hand. Franco Brusati’s 1973 film “Bread and Chocolate” comically examines similar issues; in this case Swiss prejudices against Italian immigrants to that country--bread representing the Italians, chocolate the Swiss.

Modern morality was sugarcoated into an instructional movie on manners in 1971’s “Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory.” The Oompa Loompas warn, “What do you get when you guzzle down sweets, eating as much as an elephant eats?” The question is rhetorical. The gluttonous Augustus Gloop has already fallen into the river of chocolate and been sucked up by the undertow and sent via a tube to a different part of the factory. Three other bad-mannered children suffer similar fates.

Gluttony is also the topic of “Who Is Killing the Great Chefs of Europe?,” a 1978 movie in which a chocolate bombe becomes explosive. A saucier chocolate scene is the more recent “Cousin Bette,” where the married sculptor Wenceslas (Aden Young) slathers his father-in-law’s mistress (Elisabeth Shue) with chocolate and frolics in a restaurant’s private room for some high-class hedonism.

While Hallstrom’s “Chocolat” showed the candy as an upscale commodity in France, in the 1993 Cuban movie by director Tomas Gutierrez Alea, “Strawberry and Chocolate,” coffee and chocolate are common, unimaginative choices. So to show sophistication, one develops a taste for tea and strawberry ice cream.

Perhaps Forrest Gump’s famous philosophy, “Life is like a box of chocolates, you never know what you’re going to get,” sums up the use of chocolate in movies. You never know what you’re going to get, but it’s likely to be tasty.