This paper examines the 2000 film Chocolat as a thematic study of globalization, modernity, and cultural change, using chocolate as its central symbol. The paper briefly traces chocolate's ancient Mesoamerican origins, its colonial spread to Europe, and its complex associations with sexuality, religion, politics, and economics. It then synopsizes the film's narrative — in which a wandering chocolatier transforms a repressed French village during Lent — and argues that chocolate functions as the thematic link between old conservative values and a newer, more humanistic worldview. Drawing on food studies, theology, and cultural anthropology, the paper also analyzes the concept of grace as expressed through women's gift-giving and feasting in the film.
The paper demonstrates the use of a single cultural artifact — chocolate — as an analytical lens through which to examine intersecting themes of religion, gender, colonialism, and social change. This technique, common in cultural studies and food anthropology, anchors abstract arguments about modernization and grace in a tangible, historically rich object that the audience can follow across multiple disciplinary contexts.
The paper opens with a theoretical framing of food as cultural symbol, then provides historical background on chocolate's global journey from Mesoamerica to Europe. A plot synopsis of the film follows, after which the analysis deepens to argue that chocolate is the thematic bridge between conservative Catholic tradition and a more humanistic, progressive worldview. The final analytical sections focus on grace, gender, and specific scenes, before a brief conclusion ties the transformation of the village back to the broader argument about globalization and modernity.
There is no better commodity to discuss than chocolate when looking at the globalization of food. Food can tell the most astounding stories and create a sense of identity for an entire culture. The 2000 film Chocolat, viewed 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 that is 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 pull of cultural anthropology and food studies is strong here, underscoring food as symbol and metaphor — a cultural numerator essential to the human equation (Super 165).
The history of chocolate spans the globe. The film Chocolat is an expression of that history, as well as its foundational and complex historical representation. This paper briefly discusses the history of chocolate and its role in the globalization of food, synopsizes the film Chocolat, and argues that chocolate has been used as a thematic representation of the human experience of modernization. Chocolate is rivaled only by coffee, tea, and sugar as a colonial crop of wealth that spread across the world as far as colonial arms could reach. In its rich history lie politics, love, economics, slavery, religion, and especially globalization (Clarence-Smith; Goodman, Lovejoy, and Sherratt 2).
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 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 world and the new, global one.
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 her young daughter Anouk, blows into the village of Lansquenet at the beginning of Lent, upsetting the staid Lenten denials of the Catholic community (Mcfadden 117). Lent celebrates a time when individuals mirror the suffering of Christ to atone for their sins, through prayer, special services, and abstinent behaviors such as fasting, lasting from Ash Wednesday to Easter Sunday — a period of approximately six weeks.
Foods are known to play a particularly important role in identity, both individually and culturally, and chocolate is a foundational food in France. It is known as an indulgence, but is also eaten as a daily part of many lives — for example, as melted squares of dark chocolate on bread alongside a morning bowl of coffee. Chocolate would, therefore, be a likely candidate for denial during 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 the 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, or ceremonial foods such as luxury chocolate for the French (Terrio 237).
The history of chocolate is an ancient one, and the bringing of chocolate to Europe is one of the opening marks of colonization and world economic power — of which many European countries, including France, played a part. Chocolate has become a luxury food in many parts of the world, an import from Central America grown on the 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 150 feet. Eating chocolate makes your heart beat faster, and fine dark chocolate can actually help lower your cholesterol" ("Charlie's Chocolate Fact-Ory" 24).
According to tradition, the word chocolate comes from Maya and Aztec roots. The name given to the spicy drink made from roasted and ground cocoa beans — a central part of their culture — was xocolatl, which translates as "bitter water." The Aztecs even used cocoa beans as a form of currency; according to legend, ten beans would buy 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" 24).
Through its known history, chocolate has been many things to many people. In the fourth century it was utilized as medicine, much as it had been used medicinally among the Maya and Aztecs — to dress wounds, treat diarrhea and cystitis, and as an accepted remedy for tuberculosis. The cocoa bean was introduced to Europe by Christopher Columbus in 1502, as he returned from his fourth voyage to the New World; by historical account, he was the first European to taste chocolate. Variations of chocolate, including a sweetened drink with sugar and vanilla added to the roasted and brewed crushed beans, became popular in Europe in the seventeenth century. In the early Victorian era, an edible form of chocolate was developed by the Dutchman Conrad J. Van Houten, who pressed fat from roasted cacao beans to produce cocoa butter, then combined it with cocoa powder and sugar. "Charles II tried to shut down chocolate-drinking houses, saying they were 'hotbeds of sedition'" ("Charlie's Chocolate Fact-Ory" 24). The popular form of milk chocolate was first produced 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 of being in love, due to phenylethylamine — sometimes called the "love drug." Cocoa itself contains more than 500 distinct chemical compounds, giving it an extraordinarily complex blend of aromas ("Charlie's Chocolate Fact-Ory" 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 tea were cultivated and traded before it. Cocoa has a rich history as a global commodity — a luxury to some, a nuisance to others. The utilization of slave labor in the colonial world to grow cocoa is well known, though it is discussed less often than the labor histories of coffee, tea, and sugar.
Just as other world trade goods have been associated with human corruption and greed, chocolate has attracted similar associations. Many famous literary and political figures gave chocolate its own contested 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. Dickens reflected another old stereotype, portraying a corrupt Catholic cleric as a chocolate drinker. However, such pejorative views were not universal. Goethe made "a cult of chocolate and avoided coffee" until his death in 1832. Moreover, chocolate retained a reputation as a remedy for many maladies, even though its alleged aphrodisiac properties were widely discounted (Clarence-Smith 22).
Chocolate as a commodity for the redistribution of wealth began with the age of liberalism, as growing capital and commodity markets — combined with a stable currency — created financial incentives and a growing global sense of free trade. As Clarence-Smith observes, "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" (6). In so doing, the commodity market and global trade developed a new history for chocolate, one that makes it a fitting liberator in the small French village depicted in the film.
This new history is a story of sweetness and power — the power to define what constitutes refined taste (Mintz 1985). 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." Chocolate was tamed by adding heat, sugar, and more refined flavorings such as vanilla, cinnamon, amber, and musk. This 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" (Terrio 243).
Chocolate has since become one of the most varied and recognized of all food products, a symbol of many facets of human nature. Though its history has a darker side — associated with colonial forms of labor and periodic social and political condemnation — the developed world has prospered greatly from its cultivation.
The 2000 film Chocolat tells the rich and exciting story of a small village in France where most inhabitants are caught up in a web of denial and drabness, created by the ardent faith of the Comte Paul de Reynaud and his enforced code of self-denial as the proper way to live. The town is inhabited by mostly somber individuals with many secrets, until the first day of Lent in 1957, when a young woman and her illegitimate daughter arrive on the north winds of change and open a chocolaterie. The presence of the establishment, and the power chocolate holds over the town's inhabitants, proves intoxicating and sensual: new relationships are forged, and old relationships that are failing — yet consecrated by the Church — are severed.
As Lent is a time of fasting and self-denial, the arrival of such an establishment — and of the unconventional wanderer Vianne — challenges the Comte, who wages a war against her and attempts to boycott a gathering of river gypsies who arrive in town, led by Roux, Vianne's love interest. The narration even describes the conflict as a war between the château and the chocolaterie — a religious crusade of sorts. The town resists Vianne's temptations, despite constant recognition that her presence makes the lives of some inhabitants immeasurably better: it awakens passions long thought dead, saves women from abusive husbands, reunites estranged grandchildren with eccentric grandmothers, and breaks the code of silence around all things hidden.
The changes within the town become accepted only with the coming of Easter, when Vianne is informally welcomed and decides to stay. In a moment of crisis, she spills her wandering mother's ashes across the stairwell landing while arguing with her daughter — and in that act, her compulsion to wander begins to dissolve. The "progressive" townspeople — including Josephine, whom Vianne shelters from an abusive marriage, and Caroline, the Comte's secretary and suppressed love interest — mount the effort needed to hold Vianne's desired chocolate festival, as a way to ask her to stay and as a tribute to the most progressive among them who has recently died. The diabetic Armande was the only person who truly understood the need to live life to the fullest; she had asked for a party to celebrate her seventieth birthday, which ended in dancing aboard Roux's boat — and in her own death from diabetes. The boat was then burned while everyone lay sleeping, by Serge, Josephine's abusive husband, causing Roux to leave, even after he and Vianne had consummated their love. Serge's confession to the Comte awakens the Comte's understanding of his own errors and produces his long-awaited personal crisis. Yet Roux returns with the warm southern winds of summer, and Vianne flings her mother's ashes from the window, letting them blow away with her desire to wander. The nature of the town is forever changed as the humanity of faith is embraced and the long years of denial give way (Jacobs 2000). "Vianne in Chocolat brings the community together in the grand festival on Easter afternoon" (Mcfadden 123).
Vianne demonstrates an awakening even of her own ideals by choosing to stay in the village, even though the strong north wind of change still calls to her. The power of chocolate is revealed through the transformation of even the most ardent of its critics, the Comte. The film Chocolat ultimately argues that food — in this case, a commodity with a global history stretching from ancient Mesoamerica through the colonial world and into the modern era — carries within it the power to dissolve repression, invite grace, and transform communities. Through the thematic use of chocolate, the film binds together the personal and the political, the historical and the contemporary, the old world and the new.
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