Merci pour le Chocolat

A highly enjoyable thriller, this is one of Chabrol’s finest in recent years. Working with his muse Huppert, the director reveals a Hitchcockian tale of deadly game-playing and perverse behaviour amongst the residents of a rich Swiss household. Huppert plays Mika, a Swiss chocolate heiress who, years after their initial, brief union, re-marries virtuoso pianist André Polonski. He has a son Guillaume from an intervening marriage cut short by a car crash. Jeanne is a young woman with aspirations as a pianist. When she learns that she shares a strange past with Guillaume, she decides that she will enter the Polonski family, in pursuit of her origins – and a mentor.