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.
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