Sociopathic
personalities try to manipulate others out of fear that they
will otherwise be manipulated themselves. In Merci
pour le Chocolat, Marie-Clair "Mika"
Müller-Polonksi (played by Isabelle Huppert) is a wealthy
but alienated president of a Swiss chocolate manufacturing
company. Although the story does not explain how she rose
to her position, the Müller family evidently adopted
and spoiled her; and, as their only child, she doubtless survived
them and inherited the family business despite a lack of managerial
experience. She pursues happiness by showing her power through
giving to charity, manipulating people, and killing rivals,
but of course her pursuit only brings more guilt and unhappiness.
When the film begins, she is remarrying André Polonski
(played by Jacques Dutrone), her first husband, a kindly retired
pianist who immediately appears to be her lap dog; he has
retreated from reality by focusing entirely on the world of
music. After she divorced him some twenty years earlier, presumably
because he was on tour and never home enough to provide company
for her, he married a woman who bore him a son, Guillaume
(played by Rodolphe Pauly). Whenever André and his
family visited Lausanne, Switzerland, Mika invited them to
stay at her estate. On one such occasion, we learn very late
in the film, Mika drugged André's wife, who eight years
earlier died in a car crash, though he believed that she had
committed suicide. Meanwhile, a loosemouthed friend of crime
laboratory scientist Louise Pollet (played by Brigitte Carillon)
informs her pianoplaying eighteen-year-old daughter Jeanne
(played by Anna Mouglalis) of a mixup on the night of her
birth. It seems that André rushed to the hospital from
a concert and was informed incorrectly by a night nurse that
baby Jeanne was his daughter; but the matter was soon rectified,
as the real child was instead Guillaume, who is now an ambitionless
eighteen-year-old with nothing much to during his summer vacation
from college. When Jeanne reads a newspaper story publicizing
the wedding, she decides to meet her would-be father, who
perhaps as a piano teacher might help her to win the Budapest
Competition. She is in luck, and André happily tutors
Jeanne. For Mika, who is bored by the financial realities
of managing a chocolate empire, Jeanne's arrival at her door
is a threat; accustomed to controlling all those around her,
the independent Jeanne motivates Mika to rely on her sociopathic
compulsions. She begins by repeatedly telling lies about how
happy she is to have Jeanne around the house, thus not arousing
any suspicion about her real thoughts. A narcissistic personality
such as Mika will of course lie to delude others, since she
believes that the purpose of conversation is to manipulate
others rather than to share. Mika's first strange overt move
is to deliberately spill the contents of Guillaume's bedside
hot chocolate thermos onto the floor in Jeanne's presence.
Suspicious, Jeanne manages to save some of the liquid on a
sweater, and she asks her boyfriend, a chemist who works for
the Müller firm, for an analysis. A well-known rape drug
is present, that is, a drug that will cause a victim to lose
all memory of actions taking place while under its influence.
Seemingly, Mika has surreptitiously been having sex with her
stepson, thus explaining her peculiar body language during
the wedding reception. Although Guillaume is not immediately
receptive when Jeanne reports the finding about the drug,
he gradually realizes that Mika has been making him dependent
on her, so he befriends Jeanne. Mika's second strange move
occurs when she suddenly spills the contents of a pan with
boiling water on Guillaume's leg and apologizes for being
clumsy. Her aim is to prevent Guillaume from driving her car
later that night. The plot comes to a head when she professes
to have forgotten to pick up a prescription. Jeanne offers
to drive into town for the medicine, and Guillaume goes along,
but only as a passenger in the car because of his leg. Mika
has put sleeping pills in Jeanne's coffee, and the car crashes.
Despite some untidiness at the end of the film (a cellphone
call not made and a dazed Jeanne who might have stopped before
too late), the film ends with tears pouring down Mika's cheeks
when she learns that the two are not serious injured. For
director Claude Chabrol, Merci pour le Chocolat
is about "perversity," which he defines as the tendency
to derive pleasure from doing evil. Caroline Eliacheff, who
cowrote the script, is a child psychiatrist who obviously
knows how sociopaths weave their spiderwebs. Indeed, Mika
is fully in control of events until the very end, when she
finally becomes aware of her psychotic narcissism. The film
is an intense character study of the sociopathic personality,
someone who appears very charming on the outside yet cleverly
lies to create false impressions, while plotting to make acquaintances
emotionally dependent and eliminating anyone whose independence
stands in the way. MH
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