Merci pour le chocolat

Claude Chabrol directed this well-crafted thriller, which recalls the style and themes of his best-known work of the 1960s. Marie-Claire "Mika" Muller (Isabelle Huppert), who has inherited control of a large and successful Swiss chocolate company, remarries well-known musician André Polonski (Jacques Dutronc), to whom she was briefly wed 18 years ago. After their divorce, André married a woman named Lisabeth and they had a son, Guillaume (Rodolphe Pauly), whom André was left to raise alone after Lisabeth's death in an auto accident. One of André's favorite stories is how Guillaume was almost exchanged for another baby at the hospital shortly after he was born; one day André receives a visit from a young woman named Jeanne (Anna Mouglalis), who claims to be the other child. Jeanne and André soon find they have a remarkable amount in common, and that Jeanne bears a striking resemblance to the late Lisabeth. Jeanne is beginning to wonder if there's something no one has ever told her when Mika gives her a thermos of special hot chocolate as a nightcap, which she then spills all over Jeanne. Jeanne's boyfriend, Axel (Mathieu Simonet), facetiously suggests that the cocoa might be poisoned, and out of curiosity, he tests it, finding that it has indeed been laced with a sedative notorious for its use in cases of date rape. Merci Pour le Chocolat is based on a novel by American crime novelist Charlotte Armstrong.

AMG Review: One of Chabrol's most recent films, Merci Pour le Chocolat demonstrates, as if any proof were necessary, that Chabrol is still at the top of his form, and that he has mellowed somewhat from his earlier, more violent and nihilistic films. Yet the clarity of his moral vision remains intact; it seems that he has just has more sympathy for human shortcomings, even as he has become almost documentarian in his approach to the lives of the bourgeois. As with most of Chabrol, there is a mystery ostensibly at the center of the proceedings, but as the film progresses, we see that Chabrol is less interested, as is often the case, with the mechanics of crime and more involved with the issues of class and social responsibility raised by his protagonist's dilemma. Jeanne Pollet (Anna Mouglalis) discovers that she may have been exchanged at birth with another family, and determines to track them down. Confronting them, Jeanne begins to unravel a complicated story of murder and deception in which the surfaces of society start to crack, and the frozen superficiality of social convention is exposed. In this, Chabrol in his most recent films is becoming more and more like the late Luis Buñuel, whose final films were really meditations on the human condition with faint surrealist overtones. In the final analysis, the plot of Merci Pour le Chocolat is just a pretext for a clinical dissection of bourgeois society, and the difference between public perception and private reality. Chabrol's films have deepened with age, perhaps understandably as he faces his own mortality, and Merci Pour le Chocolat winds up being only tangentially involved in solving a puzzle. Rather, Chabrol asks, when you strip away the mystery, how many more mysteries remain to be unraveled?