Thanks for the Chocolate: Is this sordid thriller starring Isabelle Huppert inspired by a true story?

A summit by Claude Chabrol and Isabelle Huppert

In 2000, director Claude Chabrol brought together Isabelle Huppert and Jacques Dutronc for a bourgeois and delightfully immoral thriller: Thanks for the chocolate. If this is his first time with the famous singer, it is his sixth collaboration with the actress, 22 years after the first for Violette Nozierewhich earned him his second nomination César for best actress.

André Polonski (Jacques Dutronc), virtuoso pianist, and Mika Muller (Isabelle Huppert), CEO of the Muller chocolate factory, got married in Lausanne. Previously, André married Lisbeth with whom he had a son, Guillaume (Rodolphe Pauly). On her sixth birthday, while they were visiting Mika in Switzerland, Lisbeth was killed in a car accident. Young Jeanne Pollet (Anna Mouglalis), preparing for the competition piano player in Budapest, learns that he would be exchanged on the day of his birth for Guillaume. The nurse allegedly exchanged the two children’s bracelets. Searching for her roots and a mentor, the ambitious beginner tries to get closer to the master. This intrusion will shake the family structure…

This land is Claude Chabrol’s favorite, that of a reconstituted bourgeois family, with complex blood ties, and a blood in which flows a secret poison. An ideal starting situation for the director to develop his ambiguous treatment of good and evil, with a Isabelle Huppert wonderful, all duplicity and perversity. Somehow, Thanks for the chocolate foreshadowed Anatomy of a fall by Justine Triet, who claims inspiration from the cinema of Claude Chabrol, as he himself later claimed that of Alfred Hitchcock.

Thanks for the chocolatean adaptation of an American thriller

Discover Thanks for the chocolate, his slow building of tension and his moderation of drama until the surprising result, one might think that Claude Chabrol, accompanied by Caroline Eliacheff in the screenplay, was inspired by a news story. Or he would have had access to the dark secrets of rich families. In reality Claude Chabrol was inspired by the novel The chocolate spider web (1948) by Charlotte Armstrong, American writer and screenwriter. This is the second free adaptation of one of his works after that Break in 1970. Claude Chabrol explained to Inrocks in 2000:

“The chocolate spider web“, I had read it a long time ago, in 1950. About thirty years ago, I looked at what could be done with it, and I didn’t find the solution. (…) When I had the idea of make a movie with Isabelle Huppert as a pervert, I thought about the character in this book, who is not the main character. And I thought about it. I remembered that there was this story about the possibility of a child exchange that I found it surprising.

A true story ?

About this baby swap thing, Thanks for the chocolate It is similar to Life is a long quiet river, even though the two films are very distant. And in Étienne Chatiliez’s film, it is precisely news that is at the origin of the screenplay. But Claude Chabrol, based on Charlotte Armstrong’s book, did not leave this news which occurred in Roubaix in 1950, since The chocolate spider web was published in the United States 2 years ago. So, if this French news can echo retrospectively, Thanks for the chocolate it is in fact a work of fiction adapted from a original storyas Claude Chabrol continues:

From there, Caroline Eliacheff made a first draft of the screenplay based on the book. I worked on the first draft of Caroline based on my memories. In essence, it should be 50% book and 50% invented. Thirty years ago, I thought I was really adapting the book, when I simply had to use elements of it.

Source: Cine Serie

Ray

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