Chocolat There Is No Better

Chocolat

There is no better commodity to discuss than chocolate, when looking at the globalization of food. Food can tell the most astounding stories as well as create a sense of identity for and entire culture. In the film Chocolat, through American eyes, is an example of the changes that can be symbolized by the power of a single food item, in this case the rich historical and global food, chocolate.

A food is the ideal cultural symbol that allows the historian to uncover hidden levels of meaning in social relationships and arrive at new understandings of the human experience. The tug of cultural anthropology and sociology is strong here, and underscores food as symbol and metaphor, a cultural numerator essential to the human equation. (Super 165)

The history of chocolate spans the globe. The 2000 film, Chocolat is an expression of the history of chocolate, as well as its foundational and lurid historical representation. This work will briefly discuss the history of chocolate and its role in the globalization of food, briefly synopsize the film Chocolat, and lastly argue that chocolate has been used as a thematic representation of the human experience of modernization in the film. Chocolate, is rivaled only by coffee, tea and sugar as a colonial crop of wealth, that spread across the world as far as the colonial arms. In its rich history, are politics, love, economics, slavery, religion and especially globalization. (Clarence-Smith)

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The characters in the film, through chocolate and the experiences it brings into their lives, by its very existence in their small conservative village in France in 1959

Laubier 30) broaden their lives and allow themselves to be drawn into a world of risk and reality. The characters become modern people of the world, by opening their minds to what is real, the erotic and sensual pleasures that can transform them from a drab culture of hidden desires to one that expresses the broad nature of the human experience. Chocolate is the thematic link in the film between the old and the new, global world.

Chocolat unfolds a morality tale about a single mother with Mayan Indian roots who wanders from town to town, spreading healing and understanding to sworn enemies in the form of gifts of chocolate. Vianne Rocher (Juliette Binoche), with her red shoes and colorful dresses, and young daughter Anouk, blows into the village of Lansquenet at the beginning of Lent, upsetting the staid Lenten denials of the Catholic community.

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Lent, celebrates a time when individuals mirror the suffering of Christ to atone for their sins and thank the lord for his sacrifice, through prayer special services and abstinent behaviors such as fasting and not eating meat on Fridays which lasts from Ash Wednesday to Easter Sunday, usually a period of about 6 weeks.

Brief History of Chocolate:

Foods are known to pay a particularly important role in identity, both individually and culturally and chocolate is a foundational food in France. It is known as decadence, but is also eaten as a daily part of many lives, such as melted squares of dark chocolate on bread with one's bowl of morning coffee. Chocolate, would be a likely candidate for denial, in the season of lent.

The choice, consumption, display, and representation of foods are necessarily tied to the formation and reformation of identities -- cultural, class, ethnic, racial, and national... They mark the boundary between the Self and Other as a way of defining who we are in opposition to our Others. It is in this sense that we can interpret Annales historian Fernand Braudel's use of Brillat-Savarin's famous aphorism to describe European culture: "Tell me what you eat and I will tell you who you are. " In this process of dialectic differentiation, different peoples use certain foods as metaphors of the Self and stereotypes of the Other. The foods in question can be staple items such as rice for the Japanese (Ohnuki-Tierney 1993, 3-11) or ceremonial foods such as luxury chocolate for the French.

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The history of chocolate is an ancient one, and the bringing of chocolate to Europe is one of the beginning marks of colonization and world economic power, of which many European countries, including France played a part. Chocolate has become a luxary food in many places in the world, an import from Central America grown on a cocoa tree. "The botanical name for the cacao - or cocoa - bean is Theobroma, meaning Food Of The Gods. One chocolate chip gives enough energy for a human to walk 150ft. Eating chocolate makes your heart beat faster, and fine dark chocolate can actually help lower your cholesterol." ("Charlie's Chocolate Fact-Ory; SOME" 24) According to tradition the word chocolate comes from the Maya and Aztec roots of the plant, the name given to the spicy drink made from roasted and ground cocoa beans which was a big part of their culture is xocolatl, which translates to "bitter water." The Aztecs were even known to use the cocoa beans as a form of currency and according to legend 10 beans would buy an individual a rabbit. "The idea of chocolate as an aphrodisiac began with the Aztec emperor Montezuma. His bedtime drink was cold chocolate - but he would not let women try it." ("Charlie's Chocolate Fact-Ory; SOME" 24)

Through its known history, chocolate has been many things to many people, in the fourth century it was even utilized as a medicine, in much the same way it had been used medicinally among the Maya and Aztecs, disregarding some of the ceremonial functions of the drink. It had been used to dress wounds, treat diarrhea and cystitis as well as an accepted cure for tuberculosis. The cocoa bean was introduced to Europe by Christopher Columbus in 1502, as he was returning from his fourth voyage to and from the new world. According to history he was the first European to taste chocolate. Variations of chocolate, including a variation on the drink, that added sugar and vanilla to the roasted and brewed crushed beans popular in Europe in the Seventeenth century, up to the early Victorian times when an eatable form of chocolate was concocted, by the Dutchman Conrad J. Van Houten through pressing fat from roasted cacao beans to produce cocoa butter and then adding cocoa powder and sugar. "Charles the II tried to shut down chocolate-drinking houses, saying they were "hotbeds of sedition." ("Charlie's Chocolate Fact-Ory; SOME" 24) The popular form of milk chocolate was first produces in 1875 when condensed milk was added to dark chocolate. Chocolate was also a favorite of the famous lover Casanova who was said to have seduced women with it. There is some chemical evidence suggesting that Chocolate can produce a feeling of euphoria similar to that produced when one is in love, phenylethy-lamine, called the love drug.

Cocoa itself contains more than 500 distinct which gives it a very complex blend of aromas and a giving it an extremely complex blend of aromas. ("Charlie's Chocolate Fact-Ory; SOME" 24)

Historically the distribution of the cocoa bean grew rapidly over the many years of colonialism, being introduced in much the same way that coffee and previously tea were introduced and cultivated. Cocoa has a rich history as a global food good, a luxary to some, a nuisance to others. The utilization of slave labor, in the colonial world, to grow cocoa is well-known but not discussed as often as that of coffee, tea and sugar. The following table, shows the growth of world trade in cocoa, between 1765 and 1913.

Just as other world trade goods have been associated with human corruption and greed chocolate has also been associated with such things. Many famous and infamous literary and political figures have given chocolate its own identity.

Balzac vaunted the virile virtues of coffee, airily denouncing chocolate for contributing to the fall of Spain, by encouraging sensuality, laziness and greed. For Musset and Flaubert, chocolate was the breakfast drink of the idle rich (Bologne 1996:223-30; Bernard 1996:90). Dickens reflected another old stereotype, portraying a corrupt Catholic cleric as a chocolate drinker (Coe and Coe 1996:205). However, such pejorative views were not universal. Goethe made 'a cult of chocolate and avoided coffee' until his death in 1832 (Schivelbusch 1992:92). Moreover, chocolate retained a reputation as a remedy for many maladies, even though its alleged aphrodisiac properties were widely discounted (Barreta 1841:38).

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Chocolate as a commodity for the redistribution of wealth began with the age of liberalism as the growing capital and commodity markets, in combination with a stable currency (gold) something also sought in colonial pursuits, created a way to bring the growing consumption of cocoa to the market through financial incentives and a growing global sense of free trade.

To be sure, the extent to which this opportunity was seized was conditioned by a gap between the liberal ideal and the reality on the ground, but it mainly reflected the ability of historical actors to grasp this prospect.

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In so doing the commodity market and global trade developed a new history for chocolate, one that makes it a very fitting liberator in the small French village depicted in the film.

This new history is a story of sweetness and power, that is, the power to define what constitutes refined taste (Mintz 1985). All these accounts relate how Spanish nuns or monks were the first to domesticate a bitter, cold drink judged to be "more fit for pigs than for human consumption" (compare Constant 1988, 29; Robert 1990, 20). Chocolate was supposedly tamed by adding heat, sugar, and more refined flavorings such as vanilla, cinnamon, amber, and musk. This triumphant transformation heralded the introduction of chocolate to European nobles at court. "Hot, flavored, sweet; virtually nothing recalled its savage origins and, throughout the seventeenth century, the brown ambrosia would attract new followers" (Schiaffino and Cluizel 1988, 18).

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Chocolate has become one of the most varied and recognized of all food products. It can be seen as a symbol of many issues of human nature and the developed world has prospered and gained from its cultivation. Though its history also has a darker side, associated with the colonial forms of labor as well as the social and political condemnation of it as undesirable and even an illicit drug in some cases.

Brief Synopsis of the Film Chocolat

The 2000, film Chocolat is a rich and exciting story of a small village in France, where most of the inhabitants are caught up in a web of denial and drabness created by the ardent faith of the Comte Paul de Reynaud, and the structured sense of denial of pleasure and even truth as the right way to live. The town is inhabited by drab and mostly sad individuals with many secrets and a strictly enforced code of morals, until the first day of lent, in 1957, when a young woman and her illegitimate daughter arrive, with the north winds of change and open a chocolaterria. The presence of the establishment and the power the chocolate has over the towns inhabitants is intoxicating and sensual as new relationships are forged and old relationships that are not working, but are consecrated by God, are severed.

As, lent is a time of fasting and self-denial the entrance of such an establishment and the blasphemous wanderer Vianne challenges the Comte, who wages a war against her and also attempts to boycott a gathering of river gypsies who happen into the town and who are led by Roux, Vianne's love interest. The narration of the work even refers to the war as one between the chateau and the chocolatarrie, a religious crusade of sorts. The town resists the temptations of Vianne, despite the constant recognition that having her and the sweets there makes the lives of some of the inhabitants so much better, exciting passions long though to be dead, saving women from abusive husbands, reuniting estranged grandchildren to eccentric grandmothers and mourning mothers, as well as breaking the code of silence about all things hidden, good and bad.

The changes within the town only become accepted, with the coming of the Easter holiday, when Vianne is informally accepted, and decides to stay, having spilled the majority of her wandering mother's ashes across the landing of the stairwell in an argument with her daughter while Vianne is trying to leave, once again with the north winds of change. The "progressive" townspeople including Josephine, a woman Vianne shelters from an abusive marriage and Caroline the Comte's secretary and love interest, that he has denied himself because he cannot accept that his wife has left him, mount all the work needed to hold Vianne's desired chocolate festival, as a way to ask her to stay and in effigy of the most progressive of the townspeople, who has recently died. The diabetic Armande was the only person there who really truly understood the need to live life to the fullest, and who asked for a party to celebrate her 70th birthday, which ended in a dance aboard Roux's boat, and her own death from diabetes. The boat was burned as they all lay sleeping, by Serge, Josephine's abusive husband, which causes Roux to leave, even after the two have consummated their love for one another. Serge's confession to the Comte, awakens the Comte's understanding of the error of his ways and creates his own long awaited awakening. Yet, Roux returns with the southern summer wind and Vianne flings the ashes of her wandering mother from the window, letting it blow away with her desire to continue to wander and the nature of the town is forever changed as the humanity of the lord is embraced and as the many years of denial are squelched. (Jacobs 2000) "Vianne in Chocolat brings the community together in the grand festival on Easter afternoon."

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How Chocolate is the Thematic Link Between Old and New

The film is a modern adaptation of change and progressivism as a social movement toward modernity, and globalization and the chocolate is the element that expresses the thematic realization of change. The old drab, highly mournful atmosphere of the village is transformed though the chocolate, that is developed as much for the pleasure it gives as for the medicinal purposes of it, and as a connection to the wandering spirit of Vianne's wandering mother, who was a wandering cocoa healer from Central America, who married a French apothecary. (Jacobs 2000)

The film marks the change from conservative values, associated with the Roman Catholic church the 1950s and many decades before them Davies 15)

Laubier 28) and the chocolate is the medicine that brings the village to a new understanding of faith, a kinder more gentle expression of the desires of the lord, and an expression of the lord's humanity.

Lasse Hallstrm's Chocolat (2000),...use women's gender difference in conjunction with discussions of spirituality and the theological concept of grace. This grace is bestowed freely through the women's gifts of food and feasting. Contemporary versions of the 1940s and 1950s genre of the "women's film, "... universalize the possibility of grace.

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Grace is created through the symbolic nature of the domesticity and skill of the women as well as through the many representations of religious and social needs, that are reflected in the skill of the purveyor to demonstrate social healing.

Grace is usually defined as unmerited divine love and favor given freely to humans by God; it is also that divine influence that operates in humans to regenerate or sanctify. Grace often comes as a surprise, humans understanding it only in retrospect. How to deal with the conflict between grace and free will consumed Catholic theology for hundreds of years. Heretics were burned, and works were banned on the basis of one's attitude toward grace. As in these religious definitions, the grace proffered by Babette in Babette's Feast and Vianne in Chocolat...is given without conditions, and its acceptance changes the human community." (Mcfadden 118-119)

The grace that is expressed in the fiber of the film Chocolat demonstrates the historical sense of the value of women's work and often their capacity for forgiveness, as well as stark denial of rights when they have been wronged. Vianne is a character who bestows grace with her gifts of chocolate, but also takes away assumed and wrongfully given grace, on the part of the community by openly expressing the secrets of the inhabitants of the town. The feasts, at both the party for Armande and the festival of chocolate demonstrate a renewal of grace, a reminder to the people of he village, who will listen, that the world is full of splendor as well as self denial, and that those things should be embraced to feed the soul.

The proclamation of an unconditioned grace-which demands nothing, save the acceptance of faith-can be greeted by reason only with incredulity. What needs to be 'sacrificed,' therefore, is not human rationality, without qualification, but rather the legalistic mentality of the natural man. As Luther put it, grace must 'take us out of ourselves,' and we must learn to 'rise above reason." 9 Thus, the miraculous feasts in all three films; these events are literally transcendent, as characters are surprised out of their old selves.

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The idea that Vianne is a pagan also comes into play as the representation of a simpler life. Vianne, represents the giver of grace (the Christ figure if you will

Mcfadden 126) through simpler means, through the unconditional and through a quiet wisdom, rather than through rancor and discontent, mnet as that which is spewed from the mouth at the pulpit, in the case of the film the puppet of a priest that the Comte, is trying to mold into a conservative, rather than loving figurehead.

Grace in Chocolat is bestowed in quite different ways, as the religious conflict here is not between Protestants and Catholics, but between Catholics and pagans (either wiccans or ancient Aztecs and Mayans). As in Babette's Feast and Like Water for Chocolate, however, the one who functions as a Christ figure, bestowing grace freely, is a woman. Vianne, a non-Christian, is the representative of the good, while, in an ironic reversal, the villain in the story is the representative of the Church. Vianne bestows grace in a very Christian way by her acceptance of otherness -- the poor, the gypsies, the downtrodden-almost as a gloss on Jesus' Beatitudes and the Parable of the Good Samaritan.

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The film demonstrates the liberal approach to religion, that stresses the humanity of the faith and this is seen as the Easter sermon of the puppet priest, who has broken free of the Comte, through the Comte's display of his religious crisis, where he is found in the window of the chocolate shop, displaying the sin of gluttony, coupled with Vianne's forgiveness and offering of a healing tonic with a promise to not tell a soul.

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The development of the ideals of the work, can be seen through the demonstration of the changing values of many faiths, Catholic included.

A more liberal approach baptized all or some particular psychological or therapeutic approach, especially the humanistic theories focused on "actualization of one's potential,"...Others have striven to find a middle road. They take the insights of psychology and examine them in the light of Christian values. The Catholic Church is predominantly in this...category. Many within the mainstream Catholic tradition have been working with diligence and faith to forge approaches to spiritual direction that respect the developments and discoveries in psychology, and hold those findings in creative dialogue with a sound biblical, ecclesial, theological, and spiritual understanding of the human person. There exist many respected psychology departments in leading Catholic universities and Catholic Institutes of Psychology and Spirituality around the world. (Barrette 390)

Though these are new institutions, it must be remembered that the values of the church have evolved, and the seeds of change were limited in some areas, as old traditional values, of self denial held fast. Such, as might have been seen in a conservative small village in France, as is depicted in the film.

Another example from the film, includes the connection between chocolate and chili peppers as a figurative and real connection to the value of the human body and sensuality, through licit sexual acts, between husband and wife. One such demonstration of the characterization of the married couple, who have lost their vision of one another, one working all the time in disdain, while the other sleeps, even in church, one can assume by the hand of the bottle. Vianne, offers the wife a pepe' triangle, which is a combination of dark chocolate and chili, and is said to be "tangy" and "adventurous" and then she adds, on the house a bag of unrefined cocoa nibs (referencing nipples) from Guatemala for the woman's husband. The hint of the reference to the lost love, that was first displayed in the opening church scene when the man had to be awoken in church, as well as the woman expressing the desire to have her chocolate wrapped with a bow so she could pretend it was from her husband, demonstrate a loss between them which is further expressed when Vianne gives her the nibs. Vianne says as she hands the woman her gift, "for your husband, to awaken the passions, " and the woman responds with "you've obviously never met my husband." To which Vianne hands her the package of nibs and says, "You obviously have never tried these." The woman takes them home, walks past her husband sleeping in a chair, while she is performing another task of drudgery and tries to throw them in the dust bin, but they fall to the floor where the husband later finds them and then stumbles through the house, after eating many in a ravenous scene seeking to touch his wife. This calls to mind the supposed historical reference to the chili and the cocoa bean as symbols of sexuality.