[English review] "Monsieur Chocolat"
You may wonder why I’d post about this film on Karukerament.com. The main character, portrayed by Omary Sy, is from Cuba which means he’s from the Caribbean which means this is definitely a film to discuss the invisibilisation of Caribbean people in French cinema.
Directed by: Roschdy Zem
Release year: 2016
Summary: From circus to theater, from anonymity to glory, the incredible destiny of the clown Chocolat, the first Black artist on the French scene. The never-seen-before duo he formed with Footit meet with tremenduous popular success in the Paris of the Belle Epoque before fame, easy money, gambling and discrimination wore out their friendship and Chocolat's career. The film tells the story of this extraordinary artist.
"Telling the story" is a big shortcut that is quite possible if you take things on a first level. After watching the film, I take the film more as a tribute or even a way to legitimize Rafael's status as an artist by giving him our 21st century acknowledgement rather than a desire to tell his story in the most realistic way. “Chocolat” is an allegory of 21st century France with an unknown historical figure, hence the question: what’s the point?
Playing around historical accuracy
Some will say that the film should have been more in line with the biographical elements listed by Gérard Noiriel in his book “Chocolat, the negro clown. The forgotten story of the first Black artist of the French scene”. For example, the Devaux circus is completely invented in order to facilitate the introduction of the two characters. For more details on what is false or true, click here. Others will focus on the anachronistic aspect of some scenes that only have an echo for the French spectators that we are in 2016. Example: the fact that every interaction Rafael has with the police is because he is "sans-papier" [t/n: “undocumented person”]. This insistence on the fact that he’s undocumented is a contemporary concern to us, but what does it mean to be undocumented when you are Black in France which is in the midst of a political, cultural, social and colonial reorganization during the Third Republic?
If you’d allow me a trendy anachronism, it would be to say that Rafael is an incarnation of today's "New Black", those who have succeeded and do not see the difficulties that others continue to face in order to rise. The problem is that we, viewers in 2016, are also not familiar with the living conditions for Black people back then or how Black people were perceived at the time because there is no film about the Black people of the Belle Epoque. “Chocolat” constantly plays on the ambivalence of creating a universe where Rafael is only aware of his skin color in an economic (he’s paid less than Footit) and artistic (depicting him as a monkey, his Othellian failure) context, while his daily life seems to be going well. He goes to fancy restaurants, walks the streets of Paris without attracting any nasty remarks. So, I'm not saying that he should have been systematically discriminated against in his daily life, like people refusing to serve him in a restaurant. But, for example, when Rafael visits the colonial exhibition, the scene where he is confronted with this young African kid who asks him in his own language and with gestures why he is on this side of the fence only makes sense if Rafael lives completely in a bubble, whereas the film presents him as a circus man who himself has made a living portraying the savage, hence the fact that I’m less convinced that it serves as an electroshock like the film, I feel, wanted to present it. On the other hand, I do understand that it was a way of showing these "Black villages" to the 2016 audience.
On the other hand, this imprint of the contemporary allows us to take liberties in the symbolism of Rafael's quest to be recognized as an artist. We will never know if the real Rafael was thinking in terms of "I want to become the first black man to...", but the character of Victor, this Haitian man who helps him become aware of his situation, is there to get the message across to the viewer. And that's where I see a third level of analysis. So maybe I see more than the director/screenwriter intended to, but knowing that Haiti is the first Black Republic born less than a century before the year the film begins, making Victor Haitian doesn’t seem like a coincidence at all when you know there were already Black people from the Caribbean and Africa living in France at that time. That's the kind of aspect that doesn't come out in the film at all. Rafael lives in a completely white Paris, although we know that there were educated Black people who were active on the political scene at that time... People from Guadeloupe, Martinique, Haiti, Guyana. And when I say "we know", I mean they are names that have fallen into oblivion or have been erased from history. It’s therefore all the more unfortunate for fictional Victor who, while embodying this representation of the Black man as an educated person who knows about revolution, contributes to leaving in the shadows Black French figures who really existed during the Belle Époque.
The lack of humanization of a Black character
Beyond the " what about historical accuracy" question, I think Roschdy Zem conveys beautiful emotions in the construction of the artistic relationship between Rafael and Footit. Omar Sy and James Thiérrée form a duo that works really well. However, the plot doesn’t attempt to define their characters in depth. Chocolat is the ladies' man, the gambler, the instinctive. Footit is the hard worker, the tortured soul because he can't come to terms with his sexuality... These are stereotypes in today's fiction, but the script doesn't give them the opportunity to be more than that. So I don't know if there will be a director's cut in the DVD or how many scenes were left out in the final cut, but the simplest example I've found is this one: when Rafael and Footit work in Paris, where do they live? Sure, we see Rafael buying nice clothes, a nice car, spending his money in a clandestine gambling den, but what does his room look like? And that's what fascinated me the most in the film. The loneliness of Rafael and Footit who, outside of the show, have no life on the screen. Situations where the clown mask falls off, even in their love life, are very rare. Example: Rafael and Marie's relationship. To show that she takes insults to be the "lover of a n*gger" is a contemporary vision. On the other hand, there is no scene where we see him in front of Mary's children whom he raised as his own, it is said. I'm not even saying that there should have been more scenes. I'm just saying that the perspective to describe their relationship is one-dimensional and always from the outside point of view. Society judges their relationship, but the film doesn't give the slightest insight into other aspects of their daily lives except that Marie helps him rehearse his lines, picks him up when he's lost a lot of money gambling and, of course, sex. To sum up, again with an anachronism, I have the impression that Rafael is our vision of the rock star. Pop culture got us thinking that you're not a rock star if you don't blow your money, if you're not an addict, if you don't wander around... if you don't die anonymously.
In the end, I think that “Chocolat” is in the difficult position of being a pioneer film by default, i.e. it is considered as such even though its very purpose doesn’t allow it to be so since it romanticizes an unknown character in a period that French cinema rarely deals with anyway. It was released in an almost total desert in terms of cinematographic discourse on France's colonial past outside times of war or revolts, and even less on French territory. Apart from “Rue Case-Nègres” by Euzhan Palcy, “Sucre Amer” and “1802 l'épopée guadeloupéenne” by Christian Lara, or even two or three TV films broadcast mainly on the France Ô network, I don't know any French film like “Amistad" in which you are given an emotional heartbreaking representation of slavery in France. And even the films I just mentioned… I have no idea what place they occupy in French popular culture. That's why “Chocolat” seems to me to be more the type of film that you really appreciate once you started deconstructing our society to identify how much risks the director took, the limits imposed and some biases in the narrative choices. It's the type of film that takes on its full dimension when there's already a solid canva based on works presenting an era as faithfully as possible. It was a decision not to try to imagine what Rafael's childhood could have been like, apart from the flashback sequence developed throughout the film.
On the other hand, there’s one thing that really irritated me: Rafael in “Chocolat” is illiterate. Although he’s able to “read” Romeo and Juliet, we also see him learn how to write the word chocolate thanks to his girlfriend of the moment... The only purpose of making him read Romeo and Juliet is to introduce his knowledge of Shakespeare to make him want to play Othello which symbolizes the Black face debate in classical theater. His illiteracy is presented in a sense familiar to the viewer of 2016 but not in the sense possible in the Belle Epoque. American films, one way or another, always explain how a Black character learns how to read and write when the plot takes place before World War II. In “Chocolat”, Rafael is the son of an enslaved woman in Cuba. He’s in his thirties in the Third Republic that has just reformed its educational system to provide greater access to education. How come no one questions his ability to read or not before his White girlfriend teaches him? Why does it look like it’s his first attempt to learn how to read? Regardless of the historical accuracy of this situation, this is one of those details about which the film blurs the message to define Rafael, the man he could have been, and not just the artist that Chocolat could have been.
“Chocolat” takes place in an out-of-time Belle Epoque mimicking our system of representation to denounce things that we still denounce today. The lack of films set in this era makes you want to know what’s behind the silences, ellipses and lack of contextualization in this film. It makes you want to wish there was a bit more depth in character’s development. Nevertheless, by offering a moving story, by taking a journey through the imagination on such strong subjects, “Chocolat” leaves the bittersweet taste of a reality that is too much contemporary in 2016.
Ndlr : this original version of this article was published on myinsaeng.com on February 11th 2016.