Review: Merci Pour Le Chocolat

Claude Chabrol’s camera has a way of gently swaying back and forth as it cradles its characters, veiling tension beneath otherwise tender movements.

Merci Pour Le Chocolat
Photo: Empire Pictures

Claude Chabrol’s camera has a way of gently swaying back and forth as it cradles its characters, veiling tension beneath otherwise tender movements. There are many such motions in the director’s 48th feature film, Merci Pour Le Chocolat (also known as Nightcap), the story of an icy chocolate heiress who uses Rohypnol to manage her domestic bliss. Mika (Isabelle Huppert) rules the Muller chocolate company with an iron fist and while Chabrol spends little time with her at the workspace, we come to know her as a fiercely competitive creature less concerned with profits than with keeping up with the times. Her pianist husband Andre (Jacques Dutronc) married her not long after his first wife died in a mysterious car accident. Jeanne (Anna Mouglalis) is the young piano player that could be Andre’s biological daughter. Together they make beautiful music (oddly yet appropriately, there are two grand pianos in Andre’s living room) and while Jeanne’s birthright is ultimately of little consequence, Chabrol loves to tease Mika with the possibilities (see the fabulous graphic match that links Jeanne to Andre’s dead wife). As if guided by Andre’s favorite Liszt tune, Mika makes her way upstairs and into her stepson’s room, staring at the portrait of the woman who has seemingly returned to the present via the precocious Jeanne. Chabrol’s attention to detail is every bit as terrifying (watch as Mika recreates the past with a pot of boiling water) as his atmospheric use of sound and close-up. Guillaume (Rodolphe Pauly) plays a handheld video game while his father plays a piece by Liszt; the jarring juxtaposition of sounds is not only indicative of the son’s dubious heritage but the scene wondrously prefigures Jeanne’s domestic infiltration. Once again, Huppert makes it look easy, slithering in and out of rooms like a snake molting its skin. She’s no more terrifying in the end than she is at the beginning and while a lesser actress may have made a spectacle of her character’s transformation, Huppert welcomes sympathy for Mika just as the character breaks apart. Mika is as deadly as she is genuinely nurturing and Huppert’s final pose reinforces the film’s obsession with uncertain parentage. Sound and image gloriously converge during the film’s final crescendo when Mika metaphorically returns to the fetus.

Score: 
 Cast: Isabelle Huppert, Jacques Dutronc, Anna Mouglalis, Rodolphe Pauly, Brigitte Catillon, Michel Robin, Mathieu Simonet  Director: Claude Chabrol  Screenwriter: Claude Chabrol, Caroline Eliacheff  Distributor: Empire Pictures  Running Time: 99 min  Rating: NR  Year: 2002  Buy: Video

Ed Gonzalez

Ed Gonzalez is the co-founder of Slant Magazine. A member of the New York Film Critics Circle, his writing has appeared in The Village Voice, The Los Angeles Times, and other publications.

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