Chocolat (2016)

Chocolat arrives with the weight of a forgotten life and the posture of a correction. Roschdy Zem's film follows Rafael Padilla, a former Cuban slave's son who becomes, in 1886, the first black stage performer in France, first as the cannibal Kananga in a provincial circus, then as half of a celebrated clown duo with the white performer Foottit. Omar Sy carries the role with a physical generosity that keeps the picture from collapsing into its thesis. The production is handsome, the Belle Epoque trappings are assembled with care, and the whole enterprise wears the sober air of a monument being unveiled.

The racial consciousness here is not decorative. It is the plot. The act itself is a caricature staged for laughter, a white authoritarian and a black scapegoat, and the film never lets us enjoy the joke without noticing who pays for it. The poster that renders Chocolat as a stereotype, the police who arrest and torture him, the commander's parting line that a negro always remains a negro, these are the film's true subject. The critique of an entertainment machine that profits from his humiliation is present but modest, a sour note instead of a program. There is ambition in the recovery of a lost black artist from the colonial archive, and it is performed with blunt symbolic force. The film dramatizes more than it preaches, which is its saving grace.

What the film declines to do is equally instructive. There is no feminist argument, no queer presence, no environmental sermon, no meditation on the body or the mind. Women drift through as wives and bystanders. The camera has no interest in their interiority. A serious film, then. Not a loud one. It asks us to watch a man be turned into a joke and then discarded, and it mostly trusts the audience to draw the conclusion without a lecture. That restraint is rarer than it should be, and it leaves the picture sitting quietly at the low end of the register, a historical drama that knows its subject and keeps its voice down.