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Chocolat, the 2000 film based on the novel by Harris (1999), is a magical story about the awakening of a small French village steeped in history and Catholicism, from a stony fortress locked in time and tradition to a community brimming with vitality, via the chocolate therapy of Vianne Rocher (Juliette Binoche). Through its exploration of the passionate relationships that develop between the makers and consumers of the sensual chocolate delights, and their passion for chocolate, this film provides us with a rich study of the cultural mythology surrounding chocolate—one of the most liked and craved foods in the Western world (Rozin, Levine and Stoess, 1991). For the psychoanalytic viewer, the following questions emerge. What makes chocolate the object of such desire? What can these characters and the film director's strategies tell us about the deeper meanings attached to the sublime sensory experience of eating chocolate, and of the relationship between love, love of mothers and love of chocolate?
Research on chocolate is plentiful and has identified a cascade of complex physiological responses to chocolate that, however, do not fully explain our passion. I believe that what scientific research on chocolate has hinted at but failed to access is the role of unconscious factors. The application of a psychoanalytic perspective to Chocolat allows us to examine the role of chocolate in the film as repository for wish and fantasy, and to explore the unconscious aspects of the passion that exists for chocolate in these characters, and in our culture, highlighting the themes of transference and transformation that emerge recurrently in the film.
Itinerant chocolatier Vianne Rocher is blown mysteriously into the gray village on a chilly Ash Wednesday, the first day of Lent in 1959. We learn that Vianne is the purveyor of a powerful substance, in some way ‘needed’ by her clients to effect change. But is the magic in her, or in the chocolate? Consid