Romantics Anonymous (2010)

Romantics Anonymous arrives from 2010, a French-Belgian confection about two people who cannot speak to each other and the chocolate that eventually speaks for them. Jean-René owns a failing chocolate concern. Angélique is a gifted chocolatière crippled by social anxiety. They meet, they tremble, they fall in love through a series of stammered misunderstandings. The film treats their condition with a gentleness that borders on tact, and this is its one genuine claim to cultural significance: both leads attend a support group, both are defined by a diagnosable disorder, and that disorder drives every plot turn. Director Jean-Pierre Améris attended real Emotions Anonymous meetings as preparation. That is not a marketing line. It is the film's spine.

Beyond that, the cupboard is bare. The cast is uniformly white, Parisian, and untroubled by questions of representation. There is no racial consciousness here, no queer subtext, no environmental sermon, no redistributionist anger aimed at the financiers of the chocolate trade. Angélique's talent rescues a small business, which gives her a measure of agency, but the film frames it as an asset to a courtship, not a case for anything larger. She is not a heroine of a movement. She is a woman who can make a decent ganache and cannot make eye contact, and the film is content to leave it there. The chocolate is old-fashioned and no longer sells, which is the closest the screenplay comes to a thesis about commerce. It resolves the matter by making better chocolate.

The result is warm, small, and mercifully free of sermonizing. It does not lecture. It does not scold the audience for anything. It watches two anxious adults negotiate a dinner reservation and finds that sufficient. In an era of films that arrive with a reading list and a scowl, this restraint registers as a kind of eccentricity. The neurodivergent experience is rendered with sustained care, and that is a real accomplishment. Everything else is butter and sugar.