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Review of Chocolat (Rachel Portman)
FILMTRACKS RECOMMENDS:
Buy it... only if you must absolutely maintain a complete collection of Rachel
Portman's delicate comedic dramas, no matter how derivative they may be.
Avoid it... if you recall only the spirited, rambling acoustic guitar rhythms from the most positive moments in the film, because these superior cues only amount to about four minutes of material on album.
FILMTRACKS EDITORIAL REVIEW:
Chocolat: (Rachel Portman) When the crew of Oscar contender
The Cider House Rules reunited the following year for Chocolat,
expectations from Miramax were once again high. Lasse Hallstrom's film about a small
French town's reaction to a new chocolate shop and its controversial owner in the
late 1950's was exposed as an excess of fluff that was short on substance, wasting a
talented cast with a shallow plotline and failing to adequately frame its extremely
weightless comedy into a dramatic mould that could have elevated its appeal.
Nominated for Academy Awards for her work on both The Cider House Rules and
Chocolat was composer Rachel Portman, undoubtedly the darling of the industry
at the time. Unlike the melodramatic gravity of her composition for The Cider
House Rules, Portman's music for Chocolat takes several necessary steps
back and plays a far less obvious role in the picture. Producing an adequate
soundscape for a sensitive romantic drama is a task that the composer could complete
in her sleep, and some parts of Chocolat are so drab that you may believe that
she was indeed snoozing while writing. But, as usual, Portman inserts a few wildly
infectious cues of spirit and melody, and it is this material, along with a couple of
standard capitulations of her normal style of tender string theme that earned this
score its Golden Globe and Oscar nominations. To say that this score was heavily
overrated at the time of these nominations is a massive understatement; the
popularity of the Miramax/Hallstrom duo likely caused the music for Chocolat
to receive the attention that Portman deserved for The Legend of Bagger Vance
instead. The lesser known score is by far more engaging in its instrumental and
thematic constructs, creating a magical personality that was relatively rare in
Portman's larger body of purely functional works. Even though Chocolat is not
as broad in scope and consistently entertaining as The Legend of Bagger Vance,
Portman on auto-pilot produces a result still competitive with the average romantic
or dramatic score of the era.
Typecast into producing this variety of music for arthouse films, Portman's talent for effectively scoring such topics was beginning to result in a tiresome repetition of style for even her most avid listeners. This score's foundation will be highly familiar. The basic melodic structures typical to Portman's works, along with their usual style of feather-light performances by strings and woodwinds, exist in full force here. The themes are either anonymous in their constructs or poorly enunciated, because while the tone of their performances is easily recognizable, the actual progressions do little to leave a lasting impression on you. In a way, they had become a mechanical manifestation of a tired methodology by 2000 and in the absence of magnificent performances of significant depth, the solo variants of these melodic ideas had lost whatever unique qualities they had conveyed in previous efforts by the composer. One of the work's ironies is that its two best cues, "Vianne Sets Up Shop" and "Party Preparations," offer the score's only truly engaging personality with an ethnic flair that doesn't even seem appropriate for the setting. The spirited acoustic guitar, accordion, and woodwind performances in these two cues give it a Mediterranean sound that is distinctly Latin, bypassing the usual cliches of French accents in film music and instead pointing it towards the Italian or Spanish cultures. Some of this material is faintly reminiscent of the Tuscany portions of Portman's Only You. No matter their questionable ethnicity, these two cues are so obviously the highlights of Chocolat that you're left badly wanting at least hints of this spirit in the remaining cues. Some of Portman's normal style of chipper, prancing chase and comedy music in a minor key (led by "Vianne Confronts The Comte") attempts to stir up the same sentiment for the rebellious parts of the story, but their tempo and depth is lacking in their incarnations here (and the normally wild piano and other percussion heard in these kinds of outbursts are absent as well). Unfortunately, the remainder of Portman's music for the film is surprisingly mundane, predictable at every turn but offering the composer's stereotypical ideas in ways so subdued that it is difficult to warm up to this score. Despite making the right basic moves to suffice for Chocolat, the most devastating aspect of this score is that fails to generate the sense of genuine charm and heart heard in most of Portman's other scores (even the just previous The Closer You Get). In the score's final two cues, Portman nearly takes the score to the next level of dramatic appeal, almost engaging the layers of strings in the syrupy statements of broad theme that had defined the best moments of her career at the time. Instead, these cues both tail off into a continuation of the slow, dry sequences of elongated string and solo woodwind performances that hadn't amounted to anything previously in the work. Overall, Chocolat is adequate, but the film's attempts to artificially insert serious scenes of contemplative drama in its second half translate into cues like "Fire" and "Mayan Bowl Breaks" that have absolutely nothing to solicit repeat listens. The themes are there and Portman is loyal to them, but without any prominent enunciations of these ideas (and their anonymous forms by nature), the score quickly becomes a bore. In general, there had been many comparisons between Portman's staggered minor/major key rhythms and the style utilized by Danny Elfman in his gothic Black Beauty. Others placed this style as an offshoot of both Elfman and Patrick Doyle's work for similar productions. It's not hard to imagine why Portman and Doyle fans are often one and the same. But at times, as in Chocolat, Portman adapts a slightly more Southern European sound, and this light touch makes her music a closer relative to the established styles of composers like Nicola Piovani and Luis Bacalov. For those who appreciated their Oscar-recognized scores for Life is Beautiful and Il Postino (respectively), then Chocolat would perhaps serve as a good starting point in an investigation of Portman's career. For established Portman collectors, though, you might be disappointed by the score's lack of teeth. The album presentation includes two source pieces at the start and finish that frankly engage the listener in ways that Portman's work does not. Even at only 35 minutes of length, the score material on this album will likely test the patience of almost any listener, and the Oscar and Globe nominations for Chocolat's music were definitely not deserved. ***
TRACK LISTINGS:
Total Time: 41:40
NOTES & QUOTES:
The insert includes no extra information about the score or film.
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The reviews and other textual content contained on the filmtracks.com site may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without the prior written authority of Christian Clemmensen at Filmtracks Publications. All artwork and sound clips from Chocolat are Copyright © 2001, Sony Classical and cannot be redistributed without the label's expressed written consent. Page created 12/30/00 and last updated 1/27/09. |
