Chocolat is life

Ever watched a film and hated it right from the very first frame?

Then you'll know exactly how I felt when I saw Chocolat on Saturday afternoon.

Now, it was the wrong time of the month, we had been practically snowed in by the blizzard from the night before and the radiators were barely functioning, so you might have thought a life-affirming chick-flick would be just the ticket.

First up, let me point out that I do understand that the novel the film is based on belongs to the magical realism genre, in which it is no surprise to anyone that chocolate being the food of the South American gods, it must obviously possess miraculous properties.

(So if I slowly and sensuously munch and swallow my way through a couple of bags of milk chocolate Vienna truffles from Thorntons, doing my best Nigella Lawson impression while licking the sugar sprinkles off my fingers in between each one, I get to enjoy a steamy, passionate affair with Alfred Molina - once the protagonist has shown him the error of his ways.)

Therefore, the heroine has to be the daughter of a South American fairy-spirit, rather than a normal, average, everyday lady from Amazonia who just happens to fall in love with the visiting pharmacist from France.

This means that women characters come by their amazing knowledge and abilities purely through virtue of their genetic and spiritual inheritance, rather than through study, hard work and practice.

Despite the setting being a French village in the late Fifties, nobody who lived there seemed to have any true love or appreciation of food or drink, either sweet or savoury.  This I find almost impossible to believe in the land that likes to pride itself on being the home of great cuisine.

Unlike the author of the original book Joanne Harris, I am not half-French.  Therefore I don't have any relatives over there that I spent idyllic holidays with during my formative years (might have been more interesting and exotic for me if I had, but I haven't, so there you go).  Perhaps it is true that all the inhabitants of obscure French villages out in the middle of nowhere are inhabited purely by the prim and repressed.  Though coming from a small market town in the south of England, I would suspect not.

Anyway, despite constantly wandering from place to place with her nine-year old illegitimate daughter firmly in tow, Vienne always seems to have plenty of money with which to set up her incredibly chic new business and pay for their exquisitely well-designed new lodgings.

Where does she get all this dosh from?

(Well, if it's a magical realist book and film, then this bit must obviously be more of the magic.  So not to worry!  Just enjoy.  Wish her bank would give me that sort of backing, though.)  

The daughter Anouk was so bloody fey and twee that she seemed to have stepped straight out of a Petit Filous ad.  This is another one of those fashions in child-rearing that I completely fail to comprehend.  Okay, I can appreciate why so many British middle-class parents fear their kids ending up as manky little feral hoodies like the ones I ran into on the bus a few weeks back, or grating American airheads.  But why the longing for Pippi Longstocking crossed with a French engineer from the Limousin's daughter, if the end result is something like Anouk?

Oh yes - and dogs only feel horny if they eat magical chocolates, not because their owners have never got round to asking the local vet to lop their goolies off.

If you are a shy bloke lacking in confidence (but looking like John Hurt), then you need your dog to provide you with an excuse to talk to the sweet little widow lady with hidden depths who has somehow never got round to finding a new lover to replace her husband (who was either killed in the trenches back in 1917 or by a bomb during an air raid in this year - it was never made clear precisely what).

Johnny Depp turned up eventually to ponce round in a brown leather jacket whilst playing the guitar and talking in an Irish accent - but he really looked as if he'd spent most of the time that the movie was shooting wondering what the hell he was doing there and trying to formulate a graceful excuse out of it.

The entire experience left me with a great hankering for a massive life-affirming mug of hot chocolate with plenty of cream on the top.

I got this longing fulfilled at Starbucks.

Still waiting for the affair with Alfred Molina, though.