![]() The remote outpost where France’s family lives is vast and unpopulated. To begin making this point, Denis and her director of photography Agnès Godard create a stunningly beautiful yet isolated portrait of Cameroon. In this sense, cinema becomes the privileged vehicle for the representation of colonial power because it can show how the field of the visible articulates power relations and relations of desire-and, of course, their intermingled nature. Not surprisingly, this visual commentary also clues us into larger metaphoric meanings regarding Cameroon, France, colonialism and the politics of desire.Ĭhocolat suggests that we structure desire not on the level of the verbal but instead in the field of the visible, which is where the characters’ unspoken longings are played out. Thus, it falls to the mise-en-scène and the camera placement to clue the audience into what the characters themselves dare not articulate. ![]() The majority of the film relies on the visual rather than the verbal to explain the stresses that exist between France’s family, the servants and the family guests. The rest of the film depicts a particular moment in her childhood that seems to best capture the interracial tensions and conflicts from that time. Mungo assumes that France is a French tourist who is “slumming” her way through Africa, but as France stares out the window, the film takes us back to when she was a little girl growing up in a colonial outpost in Cameroon, where her father was a captain in the French army. On her way, she stops to enjoy an unpopulated beach and ends up obtaining a ride into the city from the only other people on the beach, William “Mungo” Park (Emmet Judson Williamson) and his son. The film was entered into the 1988 Cannes Film Festival.Ĭlaire Denis’ Chocolat (France / West Germany / Cameroon, 1988) begins with France Dalens (Mireille Perrier), a white French woman in her late twenties, returning to Cameroon to revisit her childhood home. Marc and Aimée Dalens (François Cluzet and Giulia Boschi) are the parents of France (Cécile Ducasse), a young girl who befriends Protée (Isaach de Bankolé), a Cameroon native who is the family’s household servant. Protée is moved from his in-house job to work outdoors in the garage as a mechanic.Ĭhocolat is a 1988 film directed by Claire Denis, about a French family that lives in colonial Cameroon. Aimée consequently asks her husband to remove him from the house. She attempts to seduce Protée after Luc has left but he rejects her advance. During the fight, Aimée sits nearby, unseen by the two. This later results in a fight between Luc and Protée, which Protée wins. He acknowledges Aimée’s attraction to Protée in the presence of other black servants. This is brought to a head through Luc Segalen (Jean-Claude Adelin), a Western drifter who stays with the Dalens family after a small aircraft crashes nearby. The conflict of the film comes from the discomfort created as France and her mother attempt to move past the established boundaries between themselves and the native Africans. The story is conducted through the eyes of young France, showing her friendship with the “houseboy”, Protée, as well the sexual tension between him and her young and beautiful mother, Aimée. As they ride, France’s mind drifts and we see her as a young girl in Northern French Cameroon where her father was a colonial administrator. Park (Emmet Judson Williamson), an African American who has moved to Africa and is driving to Limbe with his son. ![]() While walking, she is picked up by William J. The film begins with an adult woman named France, walking down a road toward Douala, Cameroon.
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