So my cousin asks me what the movie Chocolat is about, and I tell him, "Some woman opens a chocolate shop and everybody in town falls in love with both her delicious concoctions, as well as each other."  Then my cousin muses, "So it's like that movie with Buffy," referring to the beyond-awful Sarah Michelle Gellar film, Simply Irresistible, which shares a similar theme with Chocolat.

After the dry heaving stopped, I stepped into the theatre and was greatly relieved to find Chocolat wasn't anywhere near as bad as Irresistible, or the equally unpleasant and more recent Woman on Top.   If you head for the theatre expecting to find a wonderful film about food preparation and consumption (like Big Night) or a romantic movie that focuses on food as a tool of seduction (Like Water for Chocolate), you might go home disappointed.  A light, crowd-pleaser with above-average acting and a predictable ending, Chocolat lands somewhere between the wide gap created by Irresistible and Night - thankfully landing a bit closer to the latter than the former.

The film is set in 1959 in the tiny French town of Lansquenet, a hamlet populated by a flock of conservative bible-thumpers that would sooner lose a limb than miss a mass.  And when Vianne (Juliette Binoche, The English Patient) and her daughter Anouk (Victorie Thivisol, Ponette) stroll into Lansquenet, the whole town is in the midst of Sunday sermon.  Vianne rents a pastry shop from a dour old woman named Armande (Dame Judi Dench, Tea With Mussolini), the only Lansquenet resident who refuses to go to church.

Vianne turns the storefront into a chocolate shop, but makes the mistake of having its grand opening just as Lent begins.  As if that wasn't enough to piss off the locals, Lansquenet's mayor, Comte de Reynaud (Alfred Molina, Magnolia), gets everyone even more riled when he finds out that Vianne is both a single mother and an atheist (the horror!).  It's all too much for the town to handle and, as a result, the shop doesn't get much business despite Vianne's uncanny ability to pick the right sugary morsel to suit everyone she encounters.

In fact, the only customers Vianne gets at first are her landlord and a shoplifter named Josephine (Lena Olin, The Ninth Gate) who eventually escapes her loveless marriage to Lansquenet's café owner (Peter Stormare, Dancer in the Dark) to become Vianne's assistant (a pretty dumb development).  Both Armande and Josephine supply Chocolat with the necessary plots to keep the film from just being about a candy store.  In case that isn't enough to interest you, Vianne gets a love interest in the form of a guitar-playing, Irish gypsy (Olin's Gate costar, Johnny Depp) who doesn't show up until an hour into the film.

With the exception of Depp's disappearance, which occurs about 20 minutes after he first appears (not bad for somebody who gets their mug plastered on the film's poster), Chocolat is fairly predictable.  The film is sparsely narrated, which makes it seem like it was added as an afterthought.  There's also an awkward flashback that shows how Vianne's family discovered the secret of chocolate.  All of the laughs (and I mean all of them) come at the expense of the church, and most involve Lansquenet's new, wide-eyed priest (Hugh O'Connor), who has trouble dealing with the puritanical Mayor and his unexplainable anger toward Vianne.

Binoche delivers a one-note performance and is outperformed by most of Chocolat's supporting cast (especially Dench).  Thivisol, who was so stunning in Ponette, has little to do but prattle on about her imaginary kangaroo friend.  Depp's Irish brogue is impeccable but, unfortunately, he doesn't get to stick around long enough to leave any kind of mark on the film.

Based on Joanne Harris's novel of the same name, Chocolat is a bit of a disappointment following the success of director Lasse Hallström's last film, The Cider House Rules.  Something could have been lost in the adaptation from Harris' story, as Chocolat's screenwriter's (Robert Nelson Jacobs) only two other credits are the less-than-stellar Dinosaur and Out to Sea.  Although Hallström packs the film with great acting talent, a decent score (Cider House's Rachel Portman) and warm photography (Roger Pratt, The End of the Affair), Chocolat is not unlike eating a fistful of Vianne's creations:  They taste great on the way down, but give you a bit of a stomach ache after you've finished.

1:56 –

for a scene of sensuality and some violence