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Claire Denis’s maiden film Chocolat opens on a wide gray slice of sea and sky. Two silhouettes distantly at play in the surf do little to relieve the visual anomie. The camera curves slowly rightward, away from drear emptiness toward green-fringed shore, to stop at a young white woman, watching. Cut to closeup: a child lazes on his back in the sand, a transparent skin of seawater rising to caress, then slide away from his rich brown flesh. Soon a grown man lies down beside him, and together their bodies form a dark continent that fills Denis’s frame, anchoring our (and the observing woman’s) gaze. In effortless, elegant cinematic diction, Denis makes us experience how, for this as-yet-unidentified voyeur, people of color—color itself—signal harbor, a homeport that draws her in from those washed-out, undemarcated spaces at the horizon, back into childhood memory of "a perfect life" in French-governed West Africa during the 1950’s. Chocolat’s vehicle for time-travel is in the present, a young woman lacking in substance, a bit distracted and adrift as if she’s misplaced her life’s Baedeker.
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