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MERCI POUR LE CHOCOLAT (NIGHTCAP) Send This Review to a Friend
Isabelle Huppert has the art of playing evil women down pat and the same can be said about Claude Chabrol's ability to make tense movies that crawl under the skin. Both are in good form with "Merci pour le chocolate," known in English as "Nightcap," a taut, engrossing and suspenseful tale in which Huppert gets to inhabit a character with a cold, calculating murderous side. She succeeds unsparingly.
Huppert plays Mika Muller, owner of a chocolate factory in Switzerland. Mika and a renowned concert pianist, Andre Polonski (Jacques Dutronc) have just married for the second time. In the interim after their first brief, failed marriage Andre was married to a woman who died mysteriously in an auto accident, and they had a son, Guillaume (Rodolphe Pauly). The plot complications begin when Jeanne (Anna Mouglalis), an especially attractive young aspiring pianist of the same age as Guillaume learns that there had been talk of an infancy incident confusing her and Guillaume in the hospital where they were both born. Could she possibly be the daughter of the pianist and Guillaume the son of those she assumed were her parents?
She must investigate and Jeanne turns up at the home of Andre and Mika. Her youth, beauty and talent intrigues Andre and he invites her back so he can tutor her on the piano. Mika is clearly disturbed and jealous. She has a habit of serving hot chocolate before bedtime and something that Jeanne observes one evening arouses suspicion. Chabrol masterly builds psychological suspense and tension upon our knowledge that Mika is up to no good.
The effective but modest little film that Chabrol has co-written with Caroline Eliacheff based on Charlotte Armstrong's novel "The Chocolate Cobweb" joins the director's better works, thanks to an eerie mood, the requisite suspense and a good cast all around--especially Huppert. The Film Forum in New York has given a U.S. premiere to this Empire Pictures release.
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