Claire Denis’ Chocolat (not to be confused with the 2000 Johnny Depp cocoa-flavored rom-com, which at least had the decency to serve dessert with its nonsense) is a film about colonialism, race, power, and, apparently, the thrill of doing absolutely nothing under the oppressive heat of the African sun. Released in 1988, Chocolat was Denis’ directorial debut and plays like the cinematic equivalent of someone staring wistfully out a window for two hours while a lizard dies in the background.
This is not a movie. It’s a mood. And the mood is “emotional constipation.”
The film opens with a grown French woman named France (yes, really—on-the-nose enough for you?) returning to Cameroon, where she grew up in a colonial outpost during the 1950s. Cue the flashback, which lasts the rest of the movie and is mostly just young France—played by a girl with the expressive range of a spoon—watching her parents do weird colonial stuff like drink tea, stare into the distance, and awkwardly pretend they’re not in a morally diseased empire.
The real “action” (and I use that word loosely enough to drive a colonial supply truck through) centers on the family’s houseboy Protée, played by Isaach de Bankolé. He’s quiet. He’s stoic. He’s beautiful in that “haunted statue” kind of way. He does everything around the house—fixes the generator, tends to the garden, wrangles the white people’s fragile egos—and in return, he’s treated like sentient furniture. The white colonials nod approvingly at him like he’s a well-trained parrot. He simmers with unspoken rage. Or maybe gas. We’ll never know, because nobody talks about anything in this movie. They just glare at the horizon and pour tepid water from tin kettles.
France’s mother Aimée (Giulia Boschi), meanwhile, spends most of her time looking dramatically bored, as though colonial guilt is giving her migraines. She seems to have a low-simmering attraction to Protée, which Denis milks for every last ounce of unspoken tension. There’s a bathtub scene, a mirror scene, a “help me lift this heavy object” scene—all the classic softcore colonial slow-burn checkpoints. But nothing ever actually happens. It’s like watching a Victorian ghost story where everyone is too tired to haunt anyone.
And therein lies the problem: Chocolat is obsessed with repression. Repression of desire. Repression of guilt. Repression of acknowledging that your entire lifestyle is built on systemic exploitation. Which is all very important and thematic, sure. But it’s also excruciating. This is a movie where every scene is ten minutes too long, and every conversation feels like a hostage negotiation with silence. If Terrence Malick and a French philosophy professor had a baby and left it in the sun, this would be it.
There’s no plot to speak of—just a collection of semi-symbolic moments involving ants, dust storms, and people trying not to touch each other. You keep waiting for something to snap. For Protée to scream. For Aimée to confess. For France to pick up a stick and start drawing a coherent narrative arc in the sand. Instead, everyone just continues languishing under the oppressive weight of sun, silence, and colonialism.
Claire Denis clearly had something to say. The problem is she says it through long takes of people doing chores and the occasional philosophical muttering about boundaries—geographic, racial, emotional. The title, Chocolat, is meant to evoke both sweetness and discomfort—the pleasure of empire and the rot underneath. But instead, it just reminds you that you could be eating actual chocolate instead of watching this film about metaphorical chocolate melting in a moral vacuum.
Let’s talk about the pacing. Calling it “slow” would be generous. Glaciers have moved faster. This film is so slow it might qualify as an act of protest. At one point, I paused to make coffee and came back to find the same two characters staring at the same patch of earth, having emotionally aged 10 years but physically moved six inches. If you’ve ever wanted to watch colonialism unfold in real time while literally nothing else happens, congratulations—you’re the target audience.
Technically, the film looks great. Denis knows how to shoot heat, silence, and distance. The cinematography captures the beauty and barrenness of the landscape like a postcard from hell. But beauty without momentum is like a perfectly staged corpse—interesting for a moment, then deeply unsettling. And unlike Denis’ later works (Beau Travail or White Material), which pulse with menace beneath their stillness, Chocolat just sort of… wilts.
The ending offers no catharsis. Adult France stands on a beach, maybe remembering, maybe mourning, maybe just wondering if she left the stove on back in France. We fade to black with no resolution, no justice, no closure. Which, yes, might be the point—colonialism didn’t end cleanly. But that doesn’t mean your film has to end like someone accidentally sat on the remote.
Final Verdict?
Chocolat is the kind of movie critics pretend to love so they won’t get disinvited from Cannes. It’s a film about race, memory, and colonialism that refuses to engage emotionally or narratively with any of those things in a satisfying way. It’s a long, slow meditation on people being awful in politely restrained ways. Watch it if you enjoy watching paint dry in morally complicated rooms, or if you’ve ever said the phrase “subtext is everything” with a straight face. Everyone else? Go eat a real chocolate bar. It’ll leave you with more satisfaction and fewer questions about race, power, and why no one in this movie ever just says anything.