CHOCOLATE

Jamie works in a laboratory that artificially reproduces the flavors of long-lasting foods. Jamie is a lonely man; his wife left him and took their son with her. One night, the man wakes up and smells a strong scent of dark chocolate, as well as the taste of the same chocolate in his mouth. A few days later, while he is in a venue listening to a friend playing music, Jamie starts hearing sounds and voices that do not belong to that place, and this event is followed by visions that show him places, events, and people he does not know. These visions become increasingly frequent, and Jamie realizes he is in mental contact with Catherine, a girl who lives in Vancouver. After witnessing a murder committed by the girl, the man decides to go to the Canadian city to try to solve his problem and because he wants to meet Catherine in person, whom he is falling in love with. "Masters of Horror" is a singular project born from the mind of Mick Garris, a director known in the horror realm mainly for the adaptations of Stephen King's novels. Garris thought of gathering the most representative horror film directors in a project destined for cable TV Showtime and home video; the result is "Masters of Horror", a series of 13 half-hour films, each one directed by a major name in genre cinema; each episode has a budget of 1.8 million dollars, the location set in the Canadian city of Vancouver, and total creative freedom was granted to each director. The names involved in the project are: Don Coscarelli, Tobe Hooper, Dario Argento, Lucky McKee, Stuart Gordon, Joe Dante, John McNaughton, Larry Cohen, Takashi Miike, John Carpenter, William Malone, John Landis, and Mick Garris himself. Mick Garris, creator of the series "Masters of Horror", tackles one of the episodes of the first season, drawing inspiration from a short story he himself wrote; the result is "Chocolate" (poorly translated in Italian with the title "Il gusto dell'ossessione"), a half-hour film of mediocre quality that probably ranks among the least successful of this first season. To its credit, "Chocolate" has an intriguing and sufficiently original story that has great narrative opportunities but that, surely, manages to express them more effectively on paper than on film. The story of an ordinary man with an uninteresting existence and a boring, repetitive life who, suddenly, is catapulted into a singular and delirious experience has been told many times, and Garris, with great probability, in writing this tale, draws inspiration from the works of his great friend Stephen King, of whom some influence can be noted in describing the repetitive and banal itinerary in Jamie's life. The protagonist's progressive assimilation to the senses of the girl with whom he is in mental contact is a fairly original and well-chosen element, and so is the underlying love theme that it implies, that is, Jamie's dependence on Catherine. The man's love for the girl ends up transforming into a manic hedonism that, instead of culminating in a predictable split personality, plunges into complicity and the possibility of experiencing unique experiences for Jamie. This can undoubtedly be read as a metaphor for the androgynous nature of the human being, but the film, in reality, fails to adequately develop this theme, limiting itself to some scenes - even rather grotesque ones - such as the one in which Jamie comes into mental contact with Catherine while she is making love with her boyfriend. As has occurred in other episodes of "Masters of Horror", in "Chocolate" as well, the figure of a woman who is both beautiful and ruthless is described, almost to create a constant that unites several episodes of the series, but unlike "Imprint", "Jenifer", or "Deer Woman" - for example - the Catherine of "Chocolate" is physically a normal, attractive girl; her monstrosity does not have a dual soul-body value but resides solely within her. The flaws that most affect this half-hour film are, mainly, a too marked narrative slowness that manages to make a film of barely an hour heavy and a very marked television connotation, which poses a visual flatness assimilable exclusively to TV products, a characteristic that some authors of the series have skillfully evaded. The two protagonists of the film seem particularly well-chosen, and in part, both the beautiful Lucie Laurier (Don't Say a Word), who plays Catherine, and especially Henry Thomas (the grown-up Elliot of "E.T.") in the role of the estranged Jamie. In the hands of a more dynamic and talented director and with some changes in the narrative rhythm, "Chocolate" could have resulted in a high-quality product, so it is simply mediocre.