The Cinematheque

Claire Denis’s evocative debut feature brought her to international attention when it premiered at Cannes in 1988. Denis spent her childhood as a French colonial in West Africa, where her father was stationed. The semi-autobiographical Chocolat is structured as the memories of a woman who, as a young girl in the 1950s, lived with her family in French Cameroon. The film focuses on the relationship between eight-year-old France (Cécile Ducasse) and the family’s Cameroonian ​“houseboy” Protée (Isaach De Bankolé)—and on the sexual tension simmering between Protée and France’s mother Aimée (Giulia Boschi). The delicate balance of the household is upset by the arrival of a group of strangers, stranded by a nearby plane crash. The themes of this intimate, intricately observed work—race, class, sex, desire, eroticism, colonialism, family, ​“Otherness”—have become signature Claire Denis concerns. The score is by South Africa’s Abdullah Ibrahim. Print courtesy TIFF Film Reference Library.