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Chocolat

Lasse Hallstrom’s film Chocolat tells the story of a “quiet little village in the French countryside, whose people believed in Tranquilité - Tranquility. If you lived in this village, you understood what was expected of you. You knew your place in the scheme of things. And if you happened to forget, someone would help remind you,” (Chocolat 2000). One day however, a woman and her daughter move to the village and interrupt the tranquilité by opening a chocolaterie—during Lent.   The mayor of the village, the Comte de Reynaud, insists that chocolaterie will not change the village, and yet, despite his efforts, Vianne Roucher and her chocolates begin to transform the village and its inhabitants.   Each of the central characters, as well as the village, goes through a series of changes in standpoints using Michael Novak’s theory of story analysis.   He asserts that “the key struggle of life is that of psychic transformation:   of breakthroughs in the way one perceives events, imagines oneself, understands others, grasps the world, acts,”   (Novak 53).   The film Chocolat allows the viewers a glimpse into this psychic transformation through its characters.
The standpoints and the events that change them demonstrate the psychic transformation.   Novak articulates these standpoints through the questions “who am I?” and “who are we, human beings under these stars?” or in other words what is my identity and an individual and how to identify myself in relation to others.   The answers to these questions change as events unfold in the lives of the film’s characters create a beautiful and moving story.
The first character to explore is Vianne Roucher, the mysterious woman who opens a chocolaterie during the Lenten fast.   The single mother of a young daughter she reveals in one scene that she and Anouk have moved six times in the last two years.   Her first standpoint is I am a wanderer.   We are all following our destiny under the stars.   Her mother traveled around France dispensing...