| Bilgi : Blood and Chocolate may be the most chaste werewolf movie ever made. Granted, for a lot of folks, that may be like saying, Brown is the whitest black I’ve ever seen. So whether you agree with the latter sentiment or not, you get my drift.
Like a great many films in recent months, director Katja von Garnier’s first theatrical release in a decade (and her English-language debut) trades on both adult and childhood associations of myth and fantasy. In this case, much as Ofelia in Pan’s Labyrinth, von Garnier’s hero, Vivian, had a childhood that was torn between harsh realities and even harsher fairy tales. “When we are children,” intones Vivian over an opening flashback sequence that foreshadows what is to come, “we believe in magic.” If only things had worked out for Viv the way things usually do in the “myths and legends” she talks about.
 Flash forward from American vigilante hunters to contemporary Bucharest—into the hereditary heartland of werewolf country. Vivian lives with her (quite literally) ageless aunt and dreads the day when she’ll be the latest selection in a rather inbred tradition that resembles the worst kind of stereotypical monarchies. The resident loup garou pack leader, Gabriel, ponders making Viv his next bride as part of the ongoing (and naturally ancient) quest to preserve the werewolf bloodlines, protect Bucharest from real evil scum like drug peddlers, and keep a low enough profile so that they won’t (once more) become the targets of fearful and murderous humans.
Along comes a very human graphic novelist with a thing for werewolves. His name is Aidan, and he meets cute with Viv in a mothballed church. When it becomes obvious that the budding star-cross-bred romance will run afoul of Gabriel’s plans, Viv’s twisted cousin Rafe decides to, uh, intervene. From there, toss Romeo and Juliet into a blender with An American Werewolf in London and you can sort of tell where things are headed.
I’ll be frank. If you can’t tell yet, the horror genre in general doesn’t do a lot for (or against) me, and in particular, vampire and werewolf films bore me. Yeah, I get the whole “are we the victims of our heredity, or do we have free will” dialectic, and I understand the metaphorical value of that kind of story. In the big picture, it’s very relevant: Am I fated to be as violently angry as my father? Will I end up a drunk because my racial profile predisposes me to alcohol addiction? Do homosexual tendencies really define who I am? Am I shackled to the Church because I was raised in it? Yes, we all struggle with questions of identity, predestination, self-determination, traditionalism, and personal liberty. Personally, I’ve struggled with them a lot.
And as far as the conventional approach to the genre goes, Blood and Chocolate makes a pretty good go of taking a fresh look at those issues and turning a lot of the usual answers on their sides (if not completely on their heads). Also on the plus side, von Garnier clearly knows Europe and Romania, and her visual style with on-location shooting puts Bucharest and its environs to pretty good use. Still, the pacing leaves the film feeling overly long at barely past ninety minutes—in part due to a series of Casino Royale-style false endings. And as likeable as von Garnier’s leads are, Agnes Bruckner (as Vivian) doesn’t seem quite up to the expressive range necessary for carrying a film yet.
Von Garnier also makes pretty earnest suggestions that all the loup garou legends are really a socio-political allegory—perhaps equating the werewolves’ underground status with that of the faithful of the collapsed Holy Roman Empire, or maybe even with the plight of the Jews or the Roma. All that is pretty murky, though, and buried under the weight of genre trappings.
Still, kudos to von Garnier and company for doing something a little sweet, new, and restrained with the genre—and for attempting to remake the genre as one of hope and reconciliation rather than one of pure nihilism. Sadly, genre fans will likely wish there were less chocolate here, and more blood. |
