Tacticalin An absolute waste of money

Solidrariol Am I Missing Something?

Ketrivie It isn't all that great, actually. Really cheesy and very predicable of how certain scenes are gonna turn play out. However, I guess that's the charm of it all, because I would consider this one of my guilty pleasures.

Senteur As somebody who had not heard any of this before, it became a curious phenomenon to sit and watch a film and slowly have the realities begin to click into place.

Claudio Carvalho In Lausanne, the aspirant pianist Jeanne Pollet (Anna Mouglalis) has lunch with her mother Louise Pollet (Brigitte Catillon), her boyfriend Axel (Mathieu Simonet) and his mother. Jeanne leans that when she was born, a nurse had mistakenly told to the prominent pianist André Polonski (Jacques Dutronc) that she would be his daughter. André has just remarried his first wife, the heiress of a Swiss chocolate factory Marie-Claire "Mika" Muller (Isabelle Huppert) and they live in Lausanne with André's second marriage son Guillaume Polonski (Rodolphe Pauly). 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 visits him every day; sooner she discovers that Mika might be drugging her stepson with Rohypnol. Further, she might have killed André's second wife Lisbeth."Merci pour le Chocolat" is another ambiguous film by Claude Chabrol about evilness, alienation and manipulation. Isabelle Huppert, who is one of Chabrol's favorite's actresses, performs a wicked lady. The essence of her evil is not explained, but she is capable to drug and kill her best friend and incapable to love or donate to help children. Jeanne Pollet is manipulative and greedy, and uses the incident in the maternity hospital to get closer to André. When she sees the photo of Lisbeth in the bedroom, she returns to the pianos room where André is and puts her hands on her face exactly the same way Lisbeth did. André Polonski is alienated and lives his life in the world of music, and doping to sleep and ignoring to see what Mika did to Lisbeth. They live a hypocrite life with Guillaume, who does not have any objective in life.This film is not among the best works of Claude Chabrol, but anyway it is entertaining. My vote is seven.Title (Brazil): "A Teia de Chocolate" ("The Chocolate Cobweb")

merlin-105 The plot may not be particularly clever, but watching Huppert's brilliant, tense, technically outstanding acting in the role of a woman in search of a nervous breakdown against Dutronc's nonchalant, understated, simmering portrayal of a seedy pillhead, seemingly oblivious to what's going on around him, is worth the price of admission and then some! Supporting characters are all excellent, though the young girl is a bit too wide-eyed for her own good. The movie is also fun to watch just for its use of color, clothing, and art as symbols, including allusions to earlier Huppert classics like "La Dentelliere". While this might not be Chabrol's masterpiece, it would be a good example for any young director to study how a veteran uses the elements of his craft most economically to greatest effect. As for actors: watch Isabelle Huppert's face in the close-up during the long, final shot -- there's a whole acting lesson right there. Not a perfect movie, but enjoyable to watch if you have a mind for such details.

gridoon Any rating higher than 2-2.5 stars out of 4 for "Merci pour le chocolat" is sheer critical prejudice in favor of French cinema in general. This dull thriller is subtle to the point of lethargy, relentlessly talky and lacks credibility (at the end Mouglalis agrees to drive Huppert's car, at night, on a twisty mountain road, even though she practically knows that she has just been poisoned with sleeping pills!). At least piano-music aficionados will get an earful...

Framescourer Saw this one in an empty cinema on 12th st, NY city last sept. I'd been really looking forward to it; alas this last Chabrol/Huppert cocktail was a real disappointment.The plot centres around a Chabrol favourite, a psychologically anaomalous lead character who changes the otherwise even-keeled bourgeois status quo. But Huppert is (bored!?) too wooden and the editing holds up frames which should be dropped, suggesting a suspense and portence which the acting doesn't give.There is a sinister note to the plot and the acting that executes it, but everything falls flat scene by scene. Watch the film perhaps for Anna Mouglalis' pleasant but iconoclastic Jeanne who is the true gypsy heart amongst the otherwise uninterested and uninteresting cast. 3/10, really.