Somewhere between Rudyard Kipling and Frantz Fanon, on the shelf dedicated to (de-/post-)colonial art, one can find Chocolat, the film which brought director Clair Denis international recognition in 1988. The entire story is set a few decades earlier, during the French colonial administration, and is told from the perspective of a girl who lives together with her white family – her father is a high-ranking diplomat, her mother is a housewife – in the desert of Cameroon. The director’s talent in working with enigmas makes the framing of the story, however thin, prove to be just as intriguing: indeed, we see a young girl named France who grows up in the meantime, returning to the country where she spent her childhood. On this plain of time, things last for just a few minutes, the time it takes for her to be picked up from the side of the road by an African-American who has come to search for his roots on the continent. An episodic, yet decisive character, who is initially stubborn in his determination to be part of the story (he drops her off at one point, then decides to drive her further), which switches into his stubbornness to disappear, brusquely cutting off any relationship that might have begun; the man is an unforgettable appearance. The way Denis models these moments, paying close attention to the bustle of the place, loudly coming in through the window of the car, while at the same time coordinating the waves of desire and fear flowing between two cosmopolitan strangers that are lost in Africa in the eighties, already recommends her gaze: there is no coincidence in the fact that, in the following years, she has turned into a beacon of global arthouse cinema.

Victor Morozov

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Film critic and journalist; writes regularly for Dilema Veche and Scena9. He studied film theory in Grenoble, Paris, Dublin.

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