I missed the film Chocolat when it ran the theaters in 2000, so just recently first saw it on video at home. I was enchanted, as the film intends me to be. To my mind, it’s a story about incarnational joy—and the transformative power of the generous dispersal of the luscious in our lives.

For those who don’t recall Chocolat, here’s the plot. Free-spirited, single Mom Vianne and her pre-teen daughter move into a small French town to open a chocolate shop. The rigid mayor and his constituency of puritanical church-going Catholics are scandalized by Vianne’s joie de vivre; but gradually her charm, insightful generosity, and luscious homemade chocolates begin to win some of the townspeople over to joy. Most remain threatened, though, and even more so when a group of river drifters—as free from convention as Vianne herself—dock outside town and play music that encourages (of all things) dancing. Of course, comic fable being what it is, eventually all the townspeople and even the repressed mayor are won over as well, and the film ends as a celebration of what Bonhoeffer called the “earthiness of beauty.”

The film fits right into Image’s interest in the intersection of faith and culture, because here the church must be taught by wildly secular folks what it ought itself to be teaching. The church of this village is dour and grim, forbidding all sensual pleasure, and hence—as the young pastor finally learns and articulates, if awkwardly, in his Easter sermon at the film’s end—its pious Christians have been denying what Christ came to show us: that human life is meant to be treasured in all the pleasures that a gracious God has provided. Including chocolate and dancing.

At the film’s release, many reviewers panned it as being sentimental. I think what they missed is that the Chocolat is meant to be a fairy tale, a fable. Good and evil are clearly demarked. We know that good will win, but we don’t know how. The way that evil defeats itself is sinister at one moment, comic the next.

And I don’t see the good as sentimentally portrayed, because it often gently laughs at itself. And also because it works transformations: on key characters, and on us as viewers. The film left me with renewed hope in the power of creative joy. (I recall Heather Goodman’s insightful comment on my post of Aug.22. Heather wrote that “one of the key differences between sentimentality and beauty is the ability to transform. While sentimentality indulges emotions (and we leave unchanged, happy only to have laughed or cried), beauty…moves us. We have to do something with it, to respond to it in some way.”)

Yes, Chocolat is derivative of Babette’s Feast, that masterpiece of the heavenly banquet experienced anticipatorily here below. Both films show people’s rigidities softening under the pleasure of luscious taste. Both films’ central characters dramatize the joy of generous creativity—or creative generosity.

Chocolat doesn’t have the religious depth of Babette’s Feast, but that’s okay. In its own way, it dramatizes the meaning of living as an Easter people: people who dance with exuberance, who delight in delicious chocolate creations. Beauty is earthy! declares the film along with Bonhoeffer, whose favorite book of Scripture became the Song of Songs—because, writes Walter Brueggemann, for Bonhoeffer the Song of Songs “is an affirmation of the wholeness, goodness, and joyousness of life ordered by Yahweh.”

The irony, perhaps, is that although the film’s story has unchurched rebels teaching the church how the Incarnation has made everything human open to joy, for secular viewers the incarnational message does get through: that precisely because God chose to live as one of us, all our human delights are enfolded in God’s embrace.

In fact, Chocolat has some of the outreach that Image does. Though Image’s core readers are, I’d expect, people of religious faith for whom the arts enrich their faith and their lives (is there a difference for people of faith?), there are two other sets of readers to whom Image reaches out. One is the rigidly pious, like the over-churched villagers in Chocolat, for whom religion is reduced to a restrictive set of rules, devoid of joy. And Image reaches out, too, to our secular culture, by often offering visual arts, fiction, and poetry that has no explicitly religious reference but which draws us irresistibly toward the transcendent. For both sets of readers, art offers an unexpected opening toward a God who blesses our earthly joys.