Chocolat (1988)

France grows up in colonial Cameroon with her mother and father. The father is often away on trips. Mother and daughter befriend Protée, who works as a servant in there house. As the story progresses, we understand that their relation transcend or subvert the boundaries (these boundaries are visible and invisible to use a metaphor one of the characters suggests) set by colonial sociality. To the child, Protée is a dear friend, a conversation partner, a person whom she trusts. For the mother, Protée may be more than a friend, but this aspect of the relation cannot be revealed and when it threatens to get too close to the surface (for example by being articulated by a third party) things get bad. Chocolat (don't mix it up with the cutesy film with Johnny Depp) revolves around sexuality, but also friendship in a country in which you are at home but where you are expected to act as an outsider, as a French person - one interesting aspect of Chocolat is that the child's home is placed as it were in the middle of nowhere. The camera focuses on vast landscapes, and the small space occupied by this French family. The frame of the film, where the child is a grown-up, provides a good illustration of what this mean. France gets a hike from a black American man. He assumes France is a French tourist; it does not cross his mind that she may be at home there. Denis skillfully attends to the tensions that remain unspoken, but characterize an entire way of life. Already in this early film, she works with the visual, rather than the normal proceeding of storytelling in which every scene is carefully designed to give away a specific piece of information. Expressing what you see in the different segments of Chocolat will also require interpretive work, it will reveal how you understand the relations (as power relations, and how you see power, the limits of power etc.).