| Sociopathic personalities try to manipulate others out of fear that they will otherwise be manipulated themselves. In Merci pour le Chocolat, Marie-Clair “Mika” Müller-Polonksi (played by Isabelle Huppert) is a wealthy but alienated president of a Swiss chocolate manufacturing company. Although the story does not explain how she rose to her position, the Müller family evidently adopted and spoiled her; and, as their only child, she doubtless survived them and inherited the family business despite a lack of managerial experience. She pursues happiness by showing her power through giving to charity, manipulating people, and killing rivals, but of course her pursuit only brings more guilt and unhappiness. When the film begins, she is remarrying André Polonski (played by Jacques Dutrone), her first husband, a kindly retired pianist who immediately appears to be her lap dog; he has retreated from reality by focusing entirely on the world of music. After she divorced him some twenty years earlier, presumably because he was on tour and never home enough to provide company for her, he married a woman who bore him a son, Guillaume (played by Rodolphe Pauly). Whenever André and his family visited Lausanne, Switzerland, Mika invited them to stay at her estate. On one such occasion, we learn very late in the film, Mika drugged André’s wife, who eight years earlier died in a car crash, though he believed that she had committed suicide. Meanwhile, a loosemouthed friend of crime laboratory scientist Louise Pollet (played by Brigitte Carillon) informs her pianoplaying eighteen-year-old daughter Jeanne (played by Anna Mouglalis) of a mixup on the night of her birth. It seems that André rushed to the hospital from a concert and was informed incorrectly by a night nurse that baby Jeanne was his daughter; but the matter was soon rectified, as the real child was instead Guillaume, who is now an ambitionless eighteen-year-old with nothing much to during his summer vacation from college. When Jeanne reads a newspaper story publicizing the wedding, she decides to meet her would-be father, who perhaps as a piano teacher might help her to win the Budapest Competition. She is in luck, and André happily tutors Jeanne. For Mika, who is bored by the financial realities of managing a chocolate empire, Jeanne’s arrival at her door is a threat; accustomed to controlling all those around her, the independent Jeanne motivates Mika to rely on her sociopathic compulsions. She begins by repeatedly telling lies about how happy she is to have Jeanne around the house, thus not arousing any suspicion about her real thoughts. A narcissistic personality such as Mika will of course lie to delude others, since she believes that the purpose of conversation is to manipulate others rather than to share. Mika’s first strange overt move is to deliberately spill the contents of Guillaume’s bedside hot chocolate thermos onto the floor in Jeanne’s presence. Suspicious, Jeanne manages to save some of the liquid on a sweater, and she asks her boyfriend, a chemist who works for the Müller firm, for an analysis. A well-known rape drug is present, that is, a drug that will cause a victim to lose all memory of actions taking place while under its influence. Seemingly, Mika has surreptitiously been having sex with her stepson, thus explaining her peculiar body language during the wedding reception. Although Guillaume is not immediately receptive when Jeanne reports the finding about the drug, he gradually realizes that Mika has been making him dependent on her, so he befriends Jeanne. Mika’s second strange move occurs when she suddenly spills the contents of a pan with boiling water on Guillaume’s leg and apologizes for being clumsy. Her aim is to prevent Guillaume from driving her car later that night. The plot comes to a head when she professes to have forgotten to pick up a prescription. Jeanne offers to drive into town for the medicine, and Guillaume goes along, but only as a passenger in the car because of his leg. Mika has put sleeping pills in Jeanne’s coffee, and the car crashes. Despite some untidiness at the end of the film (a cellphone call not made and a dazed Jeanne who might have stopped before too late), the film ends with tears pouring down Mika’s cheeks when she learns that the two are not serious injured. For director Claude Chabrol, Merci pour le Chocolat is about “perversity,” which he defines as the tendency to derive pleasure from doing evil. Caroline Eliacheff, who cowrote the script, is a child psychiatrist who obviously knows how sociopaths weave their spiderwebs. Indeed, Mika is fully in control of events until the very end, when she finally becomes aware of her psychotic narcissism. The film is an intense character study of the sociopathic personality, someone who appears very charming on the outside yet cleverly lies to create false impressions, while plotting to make acquaintances emotionally dependent and eliminating anyone whose independence stands in the way. MH |