Claude Chabrol's nervy and nasty little 2001 thriller Merci Pour le Chocolat is based on Charlotte Armstrong's novel The Chocolate Cobweb. In Chabrol's hands it becomes a vehicle of considerable power for the unsettling, disturbed qualities of actress Isabelle Huppert, who has been one of his most important muses over the years (their other collaborations include La Cérémonie and Rien ne va Plus). Huppert plays Mika, the owner of a Swiss chocolate factory, now married to a world-class concert pianist (Jacques Dutronc) and with a stepson who is obsessive about making... the family's drinking chocolate every day. As the clues unravel, it soon becomes clear that Mika is damaged goods. When Dutronc acquires a piano student (Anna Mougalis) in curious circumstances, Mika is forced to escalate her secret agenda. Huppert is fascinating throughout and the film is sinewy and, for the most part, rather clever, evoking shades of Hitchcock and Clouzot. Liszt's Les Funérailles is the ominous leitmotif, worked on by Dutronc and his protégé, and the Lausanne setting creates an other-worldliness which seems almost sterile. Only at the end does the picture dwindle into an almost Strindbergian inertia as Mika's motivation seems to evaporate in a rather unsatisfactory way. Until then it is spellbinding. --Piers Ford [show more]
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