'Merci' could be dark and rich, but what you get is a thin brew

Friday, October 18, 2002

By PAULA NECHAK
SPECIAL TO THE POST-INTELLIGENCER

With "Merci Pour le Chocolat," veteran French director Claude Chabrol steers star Isabelle Huppert through their sixth film collaboration ("Violette Noziere," "Story of Women" and "La Ceremonie" among them). This bloodless, nuanced little thriller carries small weight save for Huppert's enigmatic, thrifty performance.

MOVIE REVIEW

MERCI POUR LE CHOCOLAT

DIRECTOR: Claude Chabrol

CAST: Isabelle Huppert, Jacques Dutronc, Anna Mouglalis

RUNNING TIME: 99 minutes

RATING: Not rated but with thematic elements

LANGUAGE: In French with English subtitles

WHERE: Varsity

GRADE: C+

Chilly resolve certainly is a Huppert specialty, and while she frequently plays characters who are emotionally unattainable or unlikable, no one does impassive despair better.

She plays Marie-Claire, nicknamed "Mika," an heiress to a chocolate fortune, married a second time to famous pianist and composer Andre Polonski (Jacques Dutronc) and stepmother to Guillaume (Rodolphe Pauly).

She manages an upscale household with the contained efficiency of a servant. On the surface, Mika is competent and helpful, yet there's an air of callousness to her doting that suggests something isn't quite on the level. She's so strangely contained that when her family's supposedly idyllic existence is disrupted by the arrival of wide-eyed Jeanne Pollet (Anna Mouglalis), the cracks begin to appear.

Jeanne is a budding musical prodigy, eager to study with Andre, but the young woman comes with unwanted baggage -- she and Guillaume may have been switched in the hospital at birth, and Andre may be her father. Mika, sensing her perfectly ordered world might fray, decides to deal with it as neatly as she cleans her kitchen. She slips a sleeping potion into the evening cocoa -- just enough, perhaps, to cause an accident similar to the one that killed Andre's previous wife.

Chabrol, working from the crime novel "The Chocolate Cobweb" by American Charlotte Armstrong, infuses the story with his usual excoriation of the bourgeoisie, the precious, well-kept facades and the boredom that roils beneath. But while it worked chillingly well in "La Ceremonie," there's less of a payoff in this rather slight exercise.

In dwelling on surfaces, he misses the nastiness that might have made the movie a perverse thriller. He conceals Mika's mindset and reasoning, and her husband's final revelation, delivered laconically by Dutronc, has little impact. The film flat lines when it should peak and is more missed opportunity and trifle than dark, decadent truffle.