What Are The Social Issues In Chocolat

Movie Analysis The film, Chocolat, begins with an woman named, Vianne. She is a chocolate maker. Her and her daughter Anouk move frequently. They finally decided to settle in a French village. The village is very orthodox and religiously follows traditions. The town is led by the village mayor Comte Paul de Reynaud. Not long after Lent has begun, Vianne opens a chocolate shop and begins to sell delicious chocolate. This upsets the village mayor a bit. Vianne sticks out terribly in the village. She doesn’t attend mass she wears revealing clothing and even has a child out of wedlock. Despite everything that is going on in the village she is still positive when it comes to her store. Her friendly and humble nature impresses the townspeople one by one. This causes the priest to speak up about her being a tempter in the time of abstinence, self-denial, and prayer. The movie created many social problems for the city such as Violence, Religion, Abuse, and Family problems. According to our Social Problems textbook, “a social problem is a condition or pattern of behavior that of behavior that contradicts some other
condition or pattern of behavior; is defined as incompatible with the desired quality of life; is caused, facilitated, or prolonged by social factors; involves inter-group conflict; and requires social action for resolution. In the movie, a few social problems included is family issues.
An example of this is when Armande, the landlady, is upset because her daughter, Caroline, will not let her see her grandson, Luc. Caroline has her reasons though, she feels that her mother will have a bad influence on her son. Vienna does what she can to help by arranging Armande and Luc to meet in her chocolate store. Violence was definitely a problem in the movie. Specifically when Vienna becomes friends with a troubled woman named, Josephine, who is constantly being beat up and abused by her husband, Serge. He requests that Josephine return but she doesn’t which is probably for the best since he tried to attack her when she said no. Even though he tried to receive help from the mayor. He even goes so far to try to kill them by burning the boat that Anouk and Josephine were sleeping
in. In conclusion, this movie displayed a myriad of social problems that existed in this movie and that still exists today. These social problems will not be solved until we come together as a nation and work together to fix the problems that we having going on in our communities and in our world as a whole. This movie is a great visual aid to show that social problems do still exist and many people attempt to avoid them and will not accept that there is even a problem and that they are not helping to fix the current situation. Chocolat shows how new things could sometimes be better, but its never easy to let go of tradition.