Now Over 5500 Reviews and (near) Daily Updates!

WELCOME! Use the search engines on this site (or your own off-site engine of choice) to gain easy access to the complete MAKSQUIBS Archive; more than 5500 posts and counting. (New posts added every day or so.)

You can check on all our titles by typing the Title, Director, Actor or 'Keyword' you're looking for in the Search Engine of your choice (include the phrase MAKSQUIBS) or just use the BLOGSPOT.com Search Box at the top left corner of the page.

Feel free to place comments directly on any of the film posts and to test your film knowledge with the CONTESTS scattered here & there. (Hey! No Googling allowed. They're pretty easy.)

Send E-mails to MAKSQUIBS@yahoo.com . (Let us know if the TRANSLATE WIDGET works!) Or use the Profile Page or Comments link for contact.

Thanks for stopping by.

Saturday, February 25, 2023

CHOCOLAT (1988)

Forty-two when she made her directing debut (after second-unit work for high-profile art house types), Claire Denis looked back in contemplation with this superb semi-auto-biographical memory piece about her childhood in Cameroon, Africa, near the end of French colonial rule.  The film less about a young girl’s experiences than about her impressions of the adults around her: Father a district commissioner at a remote rural office; vaguely discontented wife; house servants; and a gaggle of unwanted guests stuck with them for a season when their plane goes down.  The main focus on something the young girl feels but can’t quite perceive: stoppered sexual tension swamping her mother, especially vulnerable with her husband off on official business.  Feelings centered on their handsome, efficient, seemingly impassive house servant ProtĂ©e (Isaach De BankolĂ©, not as you might imagine a non-professional, but on his eight feature); and also negatively on one of the ‘guests,’ a self-regarding adventurer who enjoys finding weaknesses, telling hard truths (as he sees them), and about as welcome as a pebble in your shoe.  Passing over narrative points for enigmatic shifts in mood, Denis’s later more acclaimed films can often seems both under-developed and over-egged.  (Including her best known work, BEAU TRAVAIL/’99, last seen in seventh place on Sight & Sounds list of all-time top films.)  But this early work shows Denis at her strongest and least over-thought.

DOUBLE-BILL:  Look right below for another CHOCOLAT.  Totally unrelated, but excellent.  OR:  From 2000, five time Oscar nominated CHOCOLAT, very popular, sticky sweet, too cute for words.

No comments: