My mother hated Witchcraft, so naturally I practiced it right under her nose.
She was opposed to it so completely that she wasn’t equipped to recognize anything but the most obvious symbols. I couldn’t wear a pentagram, but a crescent moon passed muster. I could write “as above/so below” across the glass pane of my bedroom window without her getting wise. And I could read anything that didn’t say WITCH STUFF on the cover in flame-red font without raising her suspicions.
I had read Joanne Harris’s Chocolat in hardback without her putting it together; both the book and the film were marketed as romcoms. When the 2000 movie came out, stars Juliette Binoche and Johnny Depp smoldered on the poster, and it seemed to my mother the kind of thing that she might like.
Poster for Lasse Hallstöm’s “Chocolat” (2000) [Miramax]
And indeed, she loved the film. It was whimsical and romantic: Vianne Rocher (Binoche), a Mary Poppins-esque figure, blows into a postwar French village, bringing pleasure and mystery to a straitlaced and miserable town bullied by its comte-cum-monsieur-le-mayor, Reynaud (Alfred Molina). She solves problems ranging from boredom to domestic violence to racism against the Roma, all the while looking beautiful and defying convention.
“I think I might like to read the book it’s based on,” my mother said, thoughtful. “It reminds me of Like Water for Chocolate.”
I wasn’t sure it shared much with Laura Esquivel’s 1992 novel beyond the title, but I knew that while my mother loved the magical realism of one, she’d abhor the folk magic in the other.
“I don’t think you’d enjoy it,” I told her carefully. “She’s a witch.”
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In Harris’ novel, Vianne doesn’t like, or use, that word. Nevertheless, she uses glamours, eschews the enforced Catholic morals of her place and time, divines the answers to her questions with midnight apple peels, and hangs a charm by her front door to draw customers in. She describes the magic of making chocolate couverture, the process dependent on the weather and the expertise of the practitioner with a fervor typically reserved for ritual and/or sex. I knew witchcraft when I saw it, and I knew my mother would put the book down for its “darkness.”
Darkness is the condition of Lansquenet-sous-Tannes before Vianne and her daughter, Anouk (Victoire Thivisol, voiced by Sally Taylor-Isherwood when Thivisol’s French accent became unwieldy in the dialogue) arrive. Miserable people contend with grief, like Guillame Blerot (John Wood), who has not yet let go of his losses in the first World War, though he has since lived through a second. They contend with violence, as with Josephine Muscat (Lena Olin), whose husband Serge (Peter Stormare) beats her.
Harris’s novel focuses on the clash of moral structures in post-war France, like the unfairness of an unwed mother’s position and the inner turmoil of the count, who caught his father in an act of infidelity and was later cozened into committing a hate crime (a multiple murder!) by a priest. The film softens much of this, focusing on the reuniting of a Caroline Clairmont (a delightfully reserved Carrie-Anne Moss) with her estranged ill mother, Armande Voizin (Judi Dench, a juggernaut even in grey wool and a matted wig) and the Mayan-inflected beauty of the titular chocolate shop.
Juliette Binoche as Vianne in “Chocolat” (2000) [Miramax]
It is within the chocolaterie that the film contains most of its folk magic. Vianne displays uncanny insight when guessing a new customer’s favorites, and uses a spinning wheel of Mayan design as a sort of Rorschach way to divine it when she cannot guess. In voice-over, Binoche spins the tale of their origins: a tribal wandering woman married to a proper French chemist, a mesalliance and a mixture of bloodlines distilling her and her daughter. They are wanderers who combine chocolate with hot pepper in defiance of European tradition.
Mothers and daughters never seem to have a smooth story to tell as a team. I had also grown up on the run, itinerant on the winds of poverty and U.S. military movement. I had also inherited dubious stories about who we were, who I might be. In Harris’ novel, Vianne remembers through the haze and chop of early childhood that she was likely abducted by the woman she calls her mother. I’m not my mother’s child, either. It’s never a smooth story to tell: some kids are adopted, some kids are stolen, and some kids are just left behind. I felt lucky that my second mother picked me up as a discard, but nothing that comes secondhand fits right.
Witchcraft was the thing my mother disliked in equal proportion to how much I loved it. It was as important to me as it was frightening to her, it was a piece of me she was unwilling to see. I knew I was Queer before I knew I was a Witch; I had practiced the selective veiling of my identity in order to stay safe, to barter for acceptance.
Vianne does the same bartering, in the book. She pulls Anouk back from practicing in the open the kind of glamours that cannot be ignored. Attempting to keep the peace, she demurs from direct inquiry about her origins and focuses on the pleasure and colorful existence she can provide to others.
When Irish Travelers (or Roma – it’s never made clear, but Johnny Depp’s accent attempts Irish) appear in their floatilla on the Tannes, Roux (Depp) gives the small town is most difficult sin to resist: racism. Author Harris makes no bones about this: the Roma have come to this small town before and met with cruelty and deadly force from the ruling class. The film, again, softens this to mere arson that kills no one, but lays bare the division between people who see sin in pleasure and those who take pleasure in sin.
Juliette Binoche as Vianne Rocher and Judi Dench as Armande Voizin in “Chocolat” (2000) [Miramax]
Director Lasse Hallström (Cider House Rules) and screenwriter Robert Nelson Jacobs (The Water Horse) soften the edges of the book, making everyone lovable enough to resolve this complex story into a rom-com. The climax comes with a birthday party and a chocolate-flavored fertility festival, given for Armande. She is ready to die and wants to go out with a bang; the town, however, might just be ready to live. The antagonist is undone not by an act of remorse or contrition, but by surrender to the seduction of chocolate, the abandon of his self-denial to wallow like a pig in his own pleasure. Everyone has to be made tolerable, because this is a ‘90s movie, and tolerance is our only goal.
The novel ends only on the note that the town is freed of Lent and the stick up its collective chocolate hole. Nothing between mother and daughter changes, because the people in the book are who they are. The film ends with Vianne giving up her itinerant ways and settling down, releasing her mother’s ashes to the wind.
My mother eventually did read Chocolat. She also eventually renounced her religion of self-denial and broke open, little by little, to accept the things about me (and the rest of the world) she had been taught to mistrust: not only Witchcraft and Queerness, but also feminism, abolitionism, socialism, and a million other things I found ways to hide when I was still subject to her control. I felt small and petty for a long time for not celebrating this change and welcoming her with open arms to the colorful chocolate shop where I’d been all this time, charm bag by the door and golden glamour in the window.
Maybe when it’s made into a movie, all will be softened and forgiven.
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