2001 Talk About Movies
December
November
October
September
July/August
June
May
April
March
February
January

Little Notes
Letters

Confessions
Roamin' Catholic
Follow Me




Contents © 2001
by Jim Holman.
All rights reserved.

CHOCOLAT

Directed by Lasse Hallstrom Starring Juliette Binoche, Lena Olin, Alfred Molina. 2000, 121 minutes, Color, USA, English. In theaters now.

Ernie: It could have been great. Hallstrom showed what was wrong with her idea of, "I've got to be me and blow with the north wind." She comes to see that there's something good in communal life. But then he took the other lifestyle -- a community built around Catholicism -- and made that seem almost entirely bad. You could have ended up with a town full of good religious people who were learning to have a little more fun and honest merriment. Instead, all that organized religion can ever hope to offer is tranquility, and that's going to be at the price of all this freedom and passion and good feelings toward one another. It's going to be just an imposed kind of military peace -- almost martial law.

Matthew: The priest doesn't want to talk about Christ's divinity and the resurrection on Easter Sunday; he wants to talk about tolerance. The film portrays him as a good guy -- but he's not hung up on the rules. It's the institutional man -- the mayor -- who's the bad guy. The film says, "Look, there's even spirituality within the Catholic Church -- but it doesn't have anything to do with rules and regulations."