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 Protée (Isaach De Bankolé, 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.
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