Merci pour le Chocolat [DVD] [2001]

A film which starts, you imagine, as a nice French / Swiss comedy of manners as a rich, talented couple remarry after a separation of some twenty years or so. She is the owner of company which makes legendary drinking chocolate. He, André, is a concert pianist. They appear blissfully happy - she, Mika, had remained friends with his in-between wife, had comforted him after her tragic death, and had readily assumed the role of mother to his teenage son, Guillaume. Bliss.

Enter a young music student, a tall elegantly beautiful young woman, Jeanne, who dreams of being a concert pianist. She learns from her mother that there had been mix-up at the hospital the night she was born, the famous concert pianist believing for a time that she was his child.

She sets out to visit the pianist - with all the potential for dramatic (or even comic) tension as the happy families are torn apart. What she uncovers is the nature of evil. Mika, so sweet and helpful and caring, has a pathological disregard for others. She manipulates - with her wealth, her beauty, her charm, her sweetness, or any other weapon she can find.

This is a beautifully made film. . As an exploration of evil, it has great quality. But it is a film which doesn't really work. You can see where the story is going, you can enjoy the building tension, but ultimately the conclusion feels a bit tame. Except, Mika sheds a tear for her loss. Her husband does not. You wonder if he is so anaesthetised to any emotion other than the ones he experiences through music that he must share complicity in her crimes. He is so absorbed in his own self-importance as maestro, he simply fails to engage in the world around him. The pair are, indeed, suited to one another, but which one is most responsible for her crimes?

Claude Chabrol (Isabelle Huppert's husband) regularly makes liberal use of music in his films and this one is no exception. The direction of the piece echoes the changing mood of a concerto. The visuals are always elegant. And he celebrates his actors, particularly the female ones. This is an enjoyable film, and one which benefits from the 'making of' documentary and interview with Huppert which are offered as extras, but it is not Chabrol's best. A film to be enjoyed more for the quality of its acting than for its narrative satisfaction.

This is a brilliant thriller. Don't expect a Hollywood-type thriller though - this is slow moving, with unexpected twists, and completely based on character rather than fast cuts or car chases. Huppert gives a great performance as the cold, enigmatic, yet deeply sympathetic Mika.

Simply put, a cold case is an old case where evidence and suspicions have dried up, and is virtually impossible to solve unless there are new developments.

And a clever cold case lies at the heart of Claude Chabrol's "Merci Pour Le Chocolat," a quietly intense little movie that allows nothing but the actors to carry the plot forward, and maintain suspense. No overwrought soundtracks or theatrics here -- it's a very slow, subtle build of tension and suspicion, with the brilliant Huppert gracefully carrying it along.

As the film opens, legendary pianist André Polonski (Jacques Dutronc) is remarrying his first wife, Marie-Claire "Mika" Muller (Isabelle Huppert), a chocolate magnate.

Elsewhere, a budding pianist named Jeanne (Anna Mouglalis) is a wee bit thrilled to find that she may have been switched at birth with Polonski's son. She goes to see him, and is warmly welcomed -- but her suspicions are oddly stoked a she sees Mika deliberately spilling the hot chocolate. Tests reveal that (drumroll please) there was a sleeping drug in it. So why's Mika doing this?

As Jeanne is taught by Andre at his home, Mika continues to hang around acting weird. The young woman becomes more and more suspicious of Mika's past behavior, especially when Andre's son Guillaume (Rodolphe Pauly) tells her how his mother died. But Jeanne's suspicions may be putting herself -- and others -- in danger...

Often suspense movies are turned into thrillers, and the bad guy always acts sinister and practically has "Evil" stamped over his face. Fortunately Chabrol doesn't resort to cliches or shortcuts -- there's not a single dramatic crescendo, crazy camera angle or brandished knife in the entire movie. The characters don't even raise their voices.

Instead, Chabrol films the entire movie in a very understated way -- it's almost like watching a long home video. Lots of quiet, realistic scenes of understated conversation and unembellished camerawork, and rarely even a soundtrack except for the exquisitely-played "Funérailles." Even the setting -- amongst the refined moneyed in a large country house -- is kept unembellished. It feels like looking into another person's life.

But he's still able to build quiet, subtle tension that shows in a hundred tiny ways, and the inevitable climax -- while wonderfully suspenseful -- is no less quiet. And Chabrol also drops plenty of little unanswered mysteries along the way -- such as Jeanne's parentage, Mika's motives, and so on. Those with short attention spans will be quickly bored, but it's fascinating to see how realistic he made this.

Isabelle Huppert is undeniably the queen of this movie -- she's quiet, friendly and inscrutable, with a faint undercurrent of jealousy whenever Jeanne is around. Dutronc is almost as good as the friendly, world-famous pianiste who starts seeing cracks in his seemingly perfect life, while Pauly and Mouglalis both do solid jobs as the dissatisfied son and the bright young musician.

"Merci Pour Le Chocolat" is a refined, old-fashioned suspense movie that relies on the actors rather than Hollywoodized gimmicks. A small treasure, though not for those who need thrills and spills.