The film this week is Chocolat (1988) directed by Claire Denis.

The daughter of a French civil servant, Claire was born in Paris but raised across colonial French Africa, including Burkina Faso, Cameroon, and Mali. Her father supported decolonisation and moved the family frequently to emphasise the importance of geography. At the age of 13, Claire contracted polio and moved back to France. Feeling like a stranger in her country, Claire left home at 17, married the much older photographer she worked as an assistant for, and moved with him to London. Although she initially studied Economics, she was encouraged by her husband to study filmmaking. She returned to Paris in 1969 and enrolled at IDHEC film school.

Upon graduation, Claire worked as assistant director for several acclaimed filmmakers, including Jim Jamursch and Wim Wenders, before branching out on her own. Her debut feature Chocolat (1988), was shot in Cameroon and draws on her own experiences and the “guilt [she] felt a child raised in a colonial world”. A non-biographical account, the film begins with France, a white French woman in her late twenties, returning to Cameroon to revisit her childhood home. While in a car ride with William “Mungo” Park, a man who has offered her a lift to the city with his son, France reminisces about her childhood at a colonial outpost and her friendship with Protee, her family’s Cameroon servant.

Through a series of concentrated memories, Claire relies on the “visual rather than verbal” and uses small gestures and mise-en-scène to highlight the underlying tensions between France’s family, their servants, and their white guests. Placing France’s family in a hidden, remote outpost, Claire captures the unspoken longings and inner conflicts of the characters through their intimate and routinely interactions in the lonely sub-Saharan grasslands.

Through a carefully cut observation, Claire offers an implicit commentary on Colonialism and the “cultivated ignorance” of whiteness. The natural beauty of the shots of Cameroon serves as stark contrast to the cruel indifference of the French human dealings with its natives, as well a systematic dehumanizing and hypersexualising of the colonised. Protée himself rarely speaks, even his body is cut off at the neck in one scene while he serves dinner. In what would become her quietly articulated style, Claire offers a disquieting perspective on post-colonialism, and unnnerving similarity to the past.