Claire Denis grew up as the daughter of a colonial official who chose that profession because he liked to travel. Born in France, but growing up in a number of African countries, she noted that she always thought of herself as an outsider rather than a resident. As Judith Mayne, who wrote a book about Denis and her film work, put it, her films “are about watching, bearing witness, and making contact.” Elsewhere Mayne notes: “the smallest detail, the brief moment of connection, is never taken for granted.”
Though Chocolat is semi-autobiographical, the main import is that the past, like the connection between blacks and whites in the film, is always out of reach. Each near intimacy and casual encounter is savored like a precious jewel. At one point the young girl in the film sees a plane drop behind a mountain range and assumes that it has gone down. Her Father tries to explain the horizon as a constantly shifting perspective, that there is no definite resting place for the plane within view. Denis takes the audience on detailed personal journeys exploring the free world of the little girl France who prods at the boundaries, her Mother Aimée who is supposed to be the mistress in charge but is isolated in the house when her husband is absent, and her Father Marc who sees his role as a traveler facilitated and energized by the infrastructure of artificial colonial relationships.
The one perspective we never see is that of the blacks who manage the world the whites inhabit. The main character, a house “boy” named Protée, was partially inspired by Cameroonian author Ferdinand Oyono’s novel Un vie de boy. The novel tells the story of colonials from the perspective of a houseboy who sees them as foolish and hypocritical objects of curiosity. Denis described it as a book that marked her adolescence. Richard Bjornson’s description of the book, which applies to the film as well, reads Europeans “want to regard the houseboy as a ‘thing that obeys’ but his potential for unmasking their pretensions makes them fear he is actually a ‘person who sees.’”
As a filmmaker, Claire Denis’ exploration of human contact has made her subjects extremely uncomfortable because the emotional, sexual, and personal intimacy in her films challenge the artificial political and social boundaries most construct as an explanation for the way life should work. She had to resist efforts to make this film an interpretation of a black perspective, something she felt was beyond her ken as a foreigner, or to require a sexual encounter between the wife and the houseboy. It was only through a trusting collaboration with Isaach De Bankolé, the actor playing Protée, that she was able to maintain the intimacy and visual honesty she desired.
Denis cherishes long associations with her actors and crew. Jean-Pol Fargeau has written all her screenplays, Agnès Godard’s exquisite cinematography, with its focus on the human body, animates all her films and many of the actors stay with her from film to film. From her perspective, the screenplay is a platform for unpredictable personal encounters set in motion by collaborators sharing a single vision. She describes it as “pure love, a kind of energy.” The communication within her film is almost entirely visual and physical. As such, the physical vocabulary along with the common vision offers a narrative of uncommon subtlety and truthfulness.