This is a blog dedicated to celebrating our favorite confection, and now it’s time to look at cinema that does the same. Below, check out the various films that help you justify the giant pack of Junior Mints (or whatever your chocolate candy of choice) that you purchase during your next movie trip.
1) Down with Love: Chocolate will singlehandedly shatter the glass ceiling. In Down with Love, author Barbara Novak cheekily asserts chocolate as a key feminist tool, basically on par with a contraceptive. Gotta love the scientific approach!
Key Lines: “You see, gentlemen, the female has a biological reaction to chocolate that triggers the same pleasurable respones in the brain as those triggered during sex. By substituting chocolate for sex, the female will soon learn the difference between sex and love. “And since the woman will not be devoting her time and energy to making herself attractive to the chocolate, or making a home for the chocolate, or making herself seem interested when the chocolate tells her how its day went, she will find she has the time and energy to move on to her to Level Two, where taking on new challenges will lead her to the self-sufficiency of Level Three, where the woman becomes active in the workforce, earning and achieving an unequivocal equality with men.” Gloria Stienem is probably snickering her heart out as we speak.
2) Chocolat: Chocolate will make you date pirates and believe in imaginary kangaroos. If Down with Love presents chocolate as a sort of culinary chastity belt, Chocolat shows the heroine’s mystical chocolate candy to function more similarly to a hallucinogenic. The people who consume it act in very out of character ways, but the scenes from the chocolaterie make these confections too good to resist. If you like your chocolate with a side of magical realism, rent this.
Key lines: Seashells. Chocolate seashells, so small, so plain, so *innocent*. I thought, oh, just one little taste, it can’t do any harm. But it turned out they were filled with rich, sinful…
3) Charlie and the Chocolate Factory: Chocolate is your meal ticket. This film is a chocolate lover’s dream, not only for the fantastical chocolate candy sets in the Chocolate Factory, but because of the subtle messaging that chocolate comes to those with the most noble character and that eating it is not a gluttonous act but an altruistic way to save your elderly grandparents and pass morality tests put to you by double-agent chocolate spies, thus revealing your true heroic nature.
Key Lines: “It’s everybody’s non-pollutionary, anti-institutionary, pro-confectionery factory of fun!”
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