Chocolat
Feelings of Ambivalence
The early years of cinema theory was preoccupied with the status of the medium (in different ways, Arnheim, Eisenstein, Pudovkin and Bela Balazs); in how film could be valued as an art form, and later became interested in the realism of the long take and deeper focus, before a shift to the language of film in semiotics, and the manipulated, passive viewer in psychoanalytic film theory. By the time of Chocolat, released in 1988, the question of cinema as a representational problem, where people of colour, women and queer issues and how they were presented on screen, became a pressing theoretical concern.
In Chocolat, near the end of the film, the houseboy, Protee and the young daughter, France, are in the boiler room, and he holds his hand for some time on a hot pipe. She asks him how hot it is, and she holds her hand on it for less than a second as it scolds her severely. When Protee (Isaac de Bankole) takes his hand off, we see how badly it is burnt, but perhaps only realise how terribly at the end of the film. Told in an extended flashback, director Claire Denis opens with the adult France back in Africa reminiscing over her childhood, and returns to the present in the closing scenes. At one moment, the driver (an American living in Africa), who has given her a lift and with whom she feels close, holds her hand, and we see that it is badly scarred. She held that pipe for the briefest of moments; how much damage must Protee have done to his palm?
It is a great example of cinematic implication in a twofold manner. We may wonder why Protee is so determined to self-harm, and one feels it isn’t enough to answer by saying that the girl’s mother has asked him to leave, and that he will no longer have employment. Is it not that he is in love with Aimee? Perhaps, but she is sending him away more because she appears to be in love with him. Not long before asking her husband, Marc (Francois Cluzet), to fire Protee, she caressed his leg, and he rejected her advances. If Denis shows the immense damage to the burnt hand by showing many years later how France’s is still scarred, and we infer how badly damaged Protee’s must have been, she also alludes to the pain of Protee’s emotions without making them explicit.
In the first place, we have the elliptical and, in the, second, the ambiguous. Denis doesn’t show us Protee rushed to the hospital and then slowly recovered. We have no idea what happens to him, but, in seeing France’s hand years later, we might wonder what work this young man, probably deemed only good for manual labour, would have been able to do after the incident. Equally, we have the ambiguous, as we cannot quite comprehend what Protee is feeling, as his expression is either muted or explicit, yet always unclear. Early in the film, when he takes a shower outside, Aimee passes with France, and after he sees them at a distance, he hammers his arm against the wall and cries. Why is he crying? Is he ashamed that Aimee may have seen him naked, or humiliated by the notion that his naked body needn’t be acknowledged by her embarrassment? It seems an indifferent moment to her; an important one for him. Denis finds a form to explore a film that is both colonial and post-colonial, and thus inevitably complex in its representation.
Denis was brought up in West Africa and, speaking of colonialism, reckons,‘‘The topic is part of my life, my impression of the world. Colonialism is not just in Africa. It is a way to take, steal, be a predator. I don’t think this will end. Look at the world. It is hard. Making film is all I can do to make change. She also notes that colonialism today is distinct from when she grew up there: this is ‘‘New colonialism. The colonialism of my childhood was something else. Today, it is a new way to take the metal – the gold or copper – or oil. It is capitalism, which is a sort of colonialism.’’ (Senses of Cinema) The way Denis speaks of it, we might see colonialist films that include her own, White Mischief, Out of Africa, Dust, The Grass is Singing, and Cry Freedom, vs post-colonial films (Denis’ Beau travail, Guerrillas in the Mist, Blood Diamond, The Constant Gardener). In the former, we usually find condescension within oppression, and in the latter, exploitation within emancipation. There was, of course, immense exploitation with the colonial project, and surely the very purpose was resource extraction, no matter all the talk of bringing civilisation to ignorant parts of the world. Shaina Gopen, notes ‘‘Kipling saw the Empire as a way to maintain stability, order, and peace amongst the people he considered to be “heathens” […] In his view, the British presence in under-developed countries helped to relieve famine, provide medical assistance, abolish slavery, and construct the physical and the psychological groundwork for ‘civilization’. (Postcolonialstudies@emory)
Whatever the complexity of Kipling’s work, which makes him more than simply a mouthpiece for colonial expansionism, nevertheless, this is how his poem, ‘The White Man’s Burden’, was initially interpreted and used, and how it has entered the culture as a term. The white man’s burden was part of the colonial view, just as more recently, investment will be the term to justify going into African countries and taking advantage of their resources. ‘The United States believes strongly in respectful partnerships with the governments and people of Africa,’’ US ambassador John Bass says, ‘‘in which our aid, which we gift on the continent, addresses humanitarian suffering and in which our investments produce benefits and results for the people on the continent, as well as people of the United States.” (Voice of America) The colonial white man’s burden becomes the post-colonial economic leg-up, but, as Denis notes, this new colonialism is no more benign and equally rapacious. It may have lost the condescension, but replaced it with the bad faith of wealthy governments believing they can make poor countries rich by making their own richer still.
Denis’ interest in Africa has generally been colonial (in Chocolat, and White Material), residually so (as we find in the presence of the Foreign Legion in Beau Travail), or what we might call post-colonially consequential. In I Can’t Sleep, No Fear, No Die, and 35 Shots of Rum, she shows characters in contemporary France who are integrated and yet also alienated. These are characters originally from West Africa, but now in France, and usually working, yet not quite escaping marginalisation. Denis explores their lives as figures no longer under colonial oppression, though experiencing pressures from elsewhere, as if Protee had managed to escape domestic servitude in Africa, but hasn’t quite become an integrated citizen in France. (Denis often casts De Bankole) However, any notion of a broader historical examination, be it colonial or post-colonial, lies in marginalisation and alienation, as though both projects can be viewed through the prism of various economic arguments, but that Denis’ chief interest is in doing so through the characters’ capacity to generate feelings like melancholy, despair, loss and frustration. Characters might not have equal opportunities, though they may, within their immense social differences, share certain states. When Protee bangs his elbow against the wall, it might not be so very different from the moment when he rejects Aimee’s overtures by picking Aimee up from her slouched position and standing her on her feet. It is after this that he goes and holds his hand on the boiler pipe. The social positions of Aimee and Protee are diametrically opposed, but they both comprehend a sexual tension, and also can both see that their romance is impossible.
Perhaps the scene which most exemplifies this desire, yet also captures very well both the style and theme so central to Denis’ work, is when Aimee asks Protee to button up the back of her dress. Her husband is elsewhere in the region, and what might have been a casual gesture coming from him, or perhaps from a female servant, becomes one fraught with suspended expectation. There, Aimee stands in front of the mirror, and Protee stands behind her. We don’t see the mirror, but it will be there and, though they are facing the same direction, they will also be looking at each other. By not showing the mirror, brings out the forcefulness of their intimacy. What would diegetically be them looking at each other through it, non-diegetically becomes two people staring into the camera, as Denis places the lens exactly where the mirror would be. It gives greater power to the scene because the look is at the viewer, a complicit gaze with the audience that can perhaps accept the sexual longing more readily than the characters themselves.
Yet this shouldn’t be seen either as a form of irony (a viewing question) or one of denial (a character problem). It isn’t quite one or the other, but an awareness perhaps on the daughter’s part that she simultaneously fails to understand, and understands all too well, their predicament. She is the young girl in the past observing events (numerous moments are from her visual perspective), and also the woman thirty years later recalling them. Yet this is more than the naivety of pre-adolescence against the maturity of a grown-up. It is also the problem of two different historical moments: the colonial and the post-colonial. If Simone de Beauvoir was right that “for the daughter of a colonial officer, the native is not a man,” then what happens when sexually the native happens to be, though the desire cannot be countenanced? Jean-Pierre Boule quotes Bouvoir in his essay on Chocolat, and also says, quoting Judith Mayne, that Mayne ‘‘writes about ‘relationships of vision’ between France and Protée and France and Mungo, but also ‘between the camera and the scene, and the spectator and the screen.’’’ (Simone de Beauvoir Studies)
What we have is the the colonial world observed by the young France, and also remembered by the older France, and a visitor in a post-colonial world where she can make a similar advance on a black man as her mother, but without the trauma of doing so to someone who is an agent of his own destiny, and not a servant to a family who are supposed to view him as invisible and functional. When France suggests to the man who gives her a lift that they might go for a drink, she offers it on the left-hand side of the frame, with him no longer in it. He reenters the frame and affectionately turns down the invite, a man who can do so without any pain involved in the rejection, as there seems nothing but pain in Protee’s, and where France can accept it without any more than the mildest of personal humiliations. In her mother’s advance towards Protee would lie a betrayal, as how could any woman of her era possibly demean herself by making overtures to a black man who, after all, as Beauvoir puts it, wouldn’t be seen as a man at all?
When Denis says in the context of having little time for South African novelist Nadine Gordimer, “The only person I can feel so much is Doris Lessing’’, she offers it as an aside. But if she seems a lot closer to Lessing than to Gordimer (no matter Robin Wood’s exploration of the links between the South African writer and the filmmaker), perhaps it rests on seeing, in the less ostensibly political Lessing, the fragility of self. The socio-political issues often explored in Gordimer’s work may create vulnerability but, if too centrally present, will offer too external a perspective. They will fail to access the characters’ emotional needs, and instead look at broader themes like injustice, greed, intolerance and cruelty. These are all present in Chocolat, but in lower-case form, explored in the nuance of emotion and the details of the environment. When Alexander E. Kaplan, quoted by Boule, says that Protee seeks revenge, saying, “France burns her hand out of trust [. ..] in this one case misplaced, to punish herself for being part of colonialism,’’ this seems an example of lower case complexity being met by higher case critical analysis. Like a number of critics’ claims that Boule questions, Kaplan wants a socio-historical certitude that the work resists. When other commentators Boule quotes propose that Aimee has Protee sacked as revenge for rejecting her advances, Boule is surely right to say, ‘‘It seems not. Rather, Aimée’s request betrays an impossible situation. She can no longer have Protée used as ‘the boy,’ and yet,’’ Boules says,‘‘because she has articulated her desire so unequivocally, he cannot be anything else. It is partly in acknowledgement of her feelings and her respect for him, having treated him as an equal, that Aimée asks that he no longer serve her. The concept of being cruel in order to be kind comes to mind.’’ (Simone de Beauvoir Studies) Someone who wishes to push broader political claims in the work, will see Aimee getting revenge on Protee because she has the power to do so, and Protee will avenge himself on France because, in his generally impotent position, that is all he can do in turn.
But while Denis has often been interested in political questions, and certainly ones concerning race and injustice, feminine emancipation and the immigrant experience, she usually does so within emotional confusion rather than to illustrate political certitude. Boule notes that ‘‘de Beauvoir has pointed out that when two human beings cannot treat each other as subjects and when one of them is considered ‘the Other,’ freedom is undermined for all concerned.’’ (Simone de Beauvoir Studies) If Denis is more Lessing than Gordimer, it might rest on seeing in Lessing a generally brittle sense of being, while in Gordimer’s work one often finds binary robustness, an oppressor and an oppressed, with the latter determined to overcome the former. That obviously isn’t an unworthy project, but it wasn’t Lessing’s and certainly isn’t Denis’s. From a socio-political perspective, Aimee is both oppressed and oppressor as she is a 50s French woman who relies on her husband, while also being a white woman who can tell the black servants what to do. Yet being able to boss Protee around is quite different from showing affection towards him. Protee may be the servant, but he is also a colonial subject, and for Aimee to sleep with him, she wouldn’t only be disgracing her husband and herself, she would be a disgrace to her country as well. She wouldn’t be executed for doing so, but this would just be a relative historical good fortune. As Boule says, again referencing the famous French feminist writer, ‘‘Beauvoir reminds her readers that fiercely racist white men have always been permitted by custom to sleep with black women. However, if a white woman had relations with a black man in the time of slavery, she would have been put to death.’’ (Simone de Beauvoir Studies)
To have told that story would have been to tell one much more politically oppressive than the story Denis offers, with the director instead drawn perhaps to the liminal, to a moment in time when Black Africa was beginning to be liberated, but where Western minds were not yet ready to accept the equality of the continent. Aimee would seem to be caught in that bind, and it manifests itself in erotic desire. At the same time, Protee might begin to see the freedoms that await him, but not quite consciously; with its burgeoning evidence perhaps there when Marc allows a traveller to stay, and Protee sees this boorish young French man, Luc, take a shower outside. Protee says this is the boys’ shower, as he simultaneously recognises his subordinate status, and yet offers in his remark potential insubordination. Later, when they get into a fight, Luc taunts Protee, aware that Protee might be the stronger man, but will he have the audacity to fight back? Protee eventually does, yet only after he is attacked. In such scenes, Protee is both colonial subject and post-colonial agent, and it is just after this confrontation with Luc, and after Protee pushes him off the porch and the man slinks away, Aimee makes her advance. It isn’t only that Protee protects the land as she has earlier requested, waiting all night by the door with a gun when Aimee is frightened after Marc has left on a work trip. It is also that Protee is asserting himself as a post-colonial subject, while Aimee might still feel herself a colonial wife.
It would be a stretch to see in Chocolat a variation of the impossible romance, but it is a theme that runs through Denis’ work rather than a generic component. The impossible romance would be exemplified by Casablanca and Brief Encounter. Nevertheless, we can provocatively see its manifestation in Beau Travail (where the central character has ambivalent and sadistic feelings for the new recruit that he doesn’t know how to subordinate), Vendredi soir (where the woman has a one night stand aware that she is moving in with her boyfriend the next morning), and Trouble Every Day (where cannibalistic desire makes coupling up a problem). It might be an exaggeration to insist Denis is fascinated by impossible romances, but it is one way of making sense of Chocolat without trying too hard to impose an overly politically assertive discourse.
When Robin Wood draws out similarities between Gordimer and Denis, he says, ‘‘The justification for juxtaposing them should be (aside even from their distinction) obvious: both grew up in Africa, both experienced colonialism and its oppressions at first hand and intimately, both were able to analyse and reject its very premise.’’ (Film International) But central to the difference is that Denis sees the political as a sphere that creates complications for the emotions, and that the emotions are the thing. While the film possesses a more aloof visual perspective than many of the later films, works that are often used as exemplifications of the tactile turn in cinema, what Denis draws out of the colonial versus post-colonial experience is the difficulty of sensations, ones that are linked to a broader world than the feeling itself. In the narrowest view, both Protee and Aimee, and France and the man who gives her a lift in the present, are both examples of overture and rejection, but the broader view illustrates how different the dynamic happens to be. Aimee risks ruining her life by acting on her yearnings, while Protee ruins his hand, realising he cannot act upon his. The romance is impossible because the wider ramifications make it so. In the present, France proposes a drink that the driver rejects, but does so with all the warmth that is inevitably missing in Protee’s rejection of her mother. Times have changed, and while feelings may be no less complex in the 1980s than they were in the 1950s, much has happened in the interim to make an ostensibly similar dynamic quite different. Not only did most African nations gain their independence, but the Civil Rights Movement put blacks, at least legally, on an equal footing with whites. The driver acts with all the confidence of a man who knows he is France’s equal, who can take a white woman’s hand with no fear, and who turns down her offer of a drink with friendly words and a jovial warning: that she should leave quickly before they (the Africans) eat her up. It is a remark that, made in the 1950s by a white man, would seem racist; from a black American who realises he doesn’t quite fit in on the continent of his ancestors, it carries irony and ambivalence, and he makes it to a woman who was brought up in Africa but is herself white.
If it happened to be the case that film theory became fascinated by representation in film by the 1980s, and absorbed the work of Frantz Fanon, Edward Said, Aime Cesaire, Eduard Glissant and others, then this was matched by a range of works often most fruitfully explored in films by West African cinema (Xala, Cedo, Yaaba, The Wind, Yeelen, Tilai). But nobody managed to catch the tension between Western perspectives and African consciousness, and the ambivalences it produced, better than Denis.
© Tony McKibbin