Better Than Chocolate

The good news is that depictions of queer characters and the queer community in Better Than Chocolate is a decade ahead of its time. The bad news is the movie is 20 years old now so it does feel at least a decade out of date.

Better Than Chocolate uses a central narrative as support for a film that depicts the LGBTQ* community in Vancouver overall. The lead character is Maggie. Maggie is 19 and has dropped out of university. She currently works at a queer bookstore. At the beginning of the film, Maggie’s mom calls to say that she’s divorced her husband and is coming stay with Maggie along with Maggie’s younger brother. The day before Maggie’s mum arrives, Maggie meets Kim. Kim is an artist who lives in a van. Quite immediately, Maggie and Kim get together and Kim comes to live with Maggie. Then, Maggie’s mum arrives. The majority of the movie is now Maggie trying to keep her queer life secret from her mother and additional subplots about other queer friends of Maggie’s including the potential closing of the bookstore Maggie works at because of obscenity.

Better Than Chocolate is one of those movies where the lead character is perhaps the least interesting. There is absolutely comedy and a full movie’s worth of material about a woman hiding her sexuality from her mother but it is not the most interesting story in the film. Several subplots are more original. Indeed, a large chunk in the middle of the film hardly features Maggie and Kim’s story line at all. Much as I don’t blame the film as other subplots were more interesting, it does blatantly show that even the movie itself thinks its lead story line not fully interesting.

As much as Maggie and Kim have great chemistry, their relationship makes little sense. It seems pretty nuts that Maggie would allow her girlfriend of one day to come live with her at the same time she knew her mom was coming to stay. And after they begin living together, the relationship mostly stops developing. Almost all scenes between Maggie and Kim are sexually charged. The only thing that’s really holding them together is their sexual chemistry. They don’t share a lot of conversations or quality time together.

This rushed, undeveloped relationship leads to a disappointing third act break-up. When Maggie’s mum finds them together, she asks Maggie is she loves Kim. Maggie dithers. This is apparently enough to cause Kim to leave. But this easily solved non-issue allows the film to easily get them back together in the third act with all of a few sentences of Maggie assuring that she really does love Kim. Convenient that the movie to created a break-up easy to undo with just a few sentences of assurance instead of focusing on a relationship issue that would’ve actually required time and conversation to sort out.

One of the major secondary characters is Judy, a trans woman. Some of the terminology and ways they discuss medically transitioning is iffy but this is overall a pretty good portrayal of a trans woman especially for 1999. Judy performs a great song in the film called “I’m Not a Fucking Drag Queen” which is funny, aggressive and informative about gender identity all at once. At one point, Judy encounters a TERF. As much as it’s not fun to see a trans woman berated and attacked, the scene ends with Maggie and Kim stopping the attack and threatening the TERF into apologizing and using Judy’s pronouns. The fact that Judy is, without question, an accepted part of this group of queer women is not a given in a movie that takes place in 1999. Judy even has a love plot with another lesbian. They get a happy ending and everything!

The part of the film that’s aged the worst is the subplot involving Maggie’s 17 year old brother. Maggie brings him to a club one night where he meets Carla. Carla is very sexual and shows him sex toys and stuff. Their night ends with them having sex together. That’s the last we see of the brother for a long time. Maggie’s mum mentions she’s worried about him because he didn’t come home but takes no steps to find him. Presumably, this 17 year old spent the third act having a lot of increasingly kinky sex with an adult woman. The epilogue of the film also says that the two of them joined a sex cult. Yikes. This plot line is played for laughs which is absolutely a double standard. I’s about an underage person getting into a heavily sexual relationship with an adult. If the genders were inverse, an underage female and of age male, this never would have been played for laughs. And it shouldn’t have been in this case either.

Better Than Chocolate is middling. It works better as a snapshot of queer culture on Vancouver in 1999 than it does a romance or comedy. That’s my biggest issue with the film; it’s not really that funny. It’s not unfunny either, I’m not mad at it. But I also can’t give it an out and out positive review. It’s only a mild success. Still, I enjoyed the atmosphere or vibe of the film is and I enjoyed spending time with these characters. I just wished the actually story of the film was stronger and the jokes funnier.

Overall rating: 6.0/10

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