6.8 | / 10 |
Users | 0.0 | |
Reviewer | 4.0 | |
Overall | 4.0 |
In Lausanne, the aspirant pianist Jeanne Pollet has lunch with her mother Louise Pollet, her boyfriend Axel and his mother. Lenna learns that when she was born, a nurse had mistakenly told to the prominent pianist André Polonski that she would be his daughter. André has just remarried his first wife, the heiress of a Swiss chocolate factory Marie-Claire "Mika" Muller and they live in Lausanne with André's son Guillaume Polonski. Out of the blue, Jeanne visits André and he offers to give piano classes to help her in her examination. Jeanne becomes closer to André and sooner she discovers that Mika might be drugging her stepson with Rohypnol. Further, she might have killed his second wife Lisbeth.
Starring: Isabelle Huppert, Jacques Dutronc, Anna Mouglalis, Michel Robin, Mathieu SimonetForeign | 100% |
Drama | 62% |
Crime | 7% |
Mystery | 5% |
Psychological thriller | 3% |
Thriller | Insignificant |
Video codec: MPEG-4 AVC
Video resolution: 1080p
Aspect ratio: 1.67:1
Original aspect ratio: 1.66:1
French: LPCM 2.0 (48kHz, 24-bit)
English
50GB Blu-ray Disc
Single disc (1 BD)
Region A (locked)
Movie | 3.5 | |
Video | 4.0 | |
Audio | 4.0 | |
Extras | 1.5 | |
Overall | 4.0 |
What’s in a name? Quite a bit, at least if you’re willing to dig a bit for meaning. Claude Chabrol’s 2000 film bears the original title Merci pour le chocolat, which even a beginning French student can probably translate as “thanks for the chocolate”. Somehow that got morphed into Nightcap for the domestic release, at least with regard to a quick subtitle which appears comically underneath the original French title, kind of like those old dubbed Toho Godzilla films where the Japanese actors’ mouths would keep moving for what seemed like minutes after the English voice actor had emitted a word or two. Nightcap tends to hint at one of the already none too subtle plot points of Chabrol’s film, though truth be told, Merci pour le chocolat may do more or less the same thing, albeit perhaps a bit more discursively. The film was actually based upon a novel by Charlotte Armstrong entitled The Chocolate Cobweb, a kind of deliciously (sorry) mixed image that might be the subtlest moniker but which Chabrol obviously took to heart, as he fills the film with not just all sorts of spidery intrigue, but allusions to actual spiders and cobwebs as well. No matter what the title, Merci pour le chocolat is one of the more notable films in Chabrol’s longstanding Hitchcock obsession. Chabrol is often termed Hitchockian, but in my estimation it’s a likeness more in theory than in actual practice. While Chabrol like Hitchcock loves to pick the scab off of complacent middle class existence, exposing an often unseemly underbelly, he rarely engages in the sorts of showy set pieces that are often used in “greatest hits” clip reels of Hitchcock’s long and august career. Chabrol never really goes for the jugular in Merci pour le chocolat, instead focusing on character interactions that may indeed turn (or even already have turned) murderous, without really making that much of the central crime. Chabrol’s focus is therefore more on the interior world of his characters rather than the external manifestations of their psychologies. In other words, had Chabrol directed Psycho, for example, it's entirely possible there would have been nothing like the iconic shower scene to get the adrenaline flowing. Chabrol could very well have been content to simply explore Norman's psyche with subtler fare, perhaps more scenes like Hitchcock's Chabrolian moment where Norman peers through a peephole at a stripping Marion Crane.
Merci pour le chocolat is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Cohen Film Collection with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 1.67:1. There is some negligible, almost unnoticeable, minor damage that occasionally crops up here, but overall the elements are in sterling condition with very few distractions. Colors are natural looking and nicely saturated. The image isn't razor sharp, but that's at least partially by design, and close- ups reveal commendable fine detail in things like the various fabrics of Mika's elegant wardrobe, or even small smudges on the side of one of André's concert grand pianos. Though this is largely made up of interior sequences, a couple of brief outdoor scenes offer fantastic depth of field. There are no signs of problematic digital intrusion of any kind and no compression artifacts of any note.
Merci pour le chocolat's original French language track is presented in LPCM 2.0. As is often the case, Chabrol's son Matthieu contributes a somewhat anachronistic score, though in this case those contributions are a bit less problematic than usual since the film is filled to the brim with classical source cues (including repeated use of Liszt's Funerailles. Music and dialogue all sound fine, with no hints of distortion or any damage. Occasional ambient environmental effects are well prioritized, and fidelity is excellent throughout the track.
There's a very dark (chocolate?) sense of humor wending its way through this film, and in fact some may want to see it as almost a comedy of manners. Mika is exceptionally well mannered, of course, but she's also decidedly lethal. If one can divorce this Chabrol effort from preconceived notions of what a thriller is "supposed" to be, Merci pour le chocolat offers a lot of interest, if frankly not that much actual intrigue. Buoyed by an exceptionally devious performance by Huppert, as well as good supporting work from her "foil", Mouglalis, and bearing Chabrol's instantly recognizable touch which skewers the placid demeanor of the bourgeoisie, Merci pour le chocolat comes Recommended.
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