Chinese Chocolate

I’m still not sure if Chinese Chocolate has enough WLW to qualify for this site. The film is entirely a prelude to a lesbian relationship.

Chinese Chocolate focuses on the lives of two Chinese immigrants living in Toronto. Camille moves to be with her husband. She has dreams of bringing Chinese medicine to Canada. But, life gets in the way. Camille’s personal life gets too complicated to realize that dream. Instead, she engages in an affair with a white man based on mutual business interests and marries him after becoming pregnant. Turns out, that’s not a strong foundation for a relationship. The second character, Jesse has even worse of a time. Jesse comes to Canada knowing little English. She dreams of being a dancer. Instead, she goes from sleeping with a man she doesn’t know was married to doing sex work and falling in with men who’d prefer to exploit her.

Chinese Chocolate leans into realism. And I think it does pretty well with it. The stories and characters feel based on true, lived experiences. But it’s merely a good attempt at realism, not a great one. And that does mean I think it’s a bit boring. It also veers a little away from realism as the film goes on. As Camille and Jesse’s lives get worse, it feels less like a tragic reality of being a woman or an immigrant. Instead, it feels more like adding more sadness for the sake of artistic drama. The connection I had with this film is that these characters felt real enough that I worried for them. But after so long with them never catching a break, it felt pointless to worry. Bad things are going to happen to them because they’re fictional and that’s the sort of story we’re in.

Many of the other reviews of Chinese Chocolate rankle at how the film depicts men. And it’s not great. There aren’t any male role models to be found in Chinese Chocolate. While the men are all bastards, the women are generally victims. Despite their intelligence and dreams, Camille and Jesse’s stories are overwhelmingly about how men treat them. Which is frequently poorly. The nuance to lead characters Camille and Jesse frequently gets lost behind another scene of how they’re mistreated by men. Intentionally or otherwise, it makes these characters with different personalities feel near identical. They both lose identity in these moments and become just another woman done wrong by a man.

Because of the shallow characterization, it means the love story doesn’t land either. Before the last scene, Camille and Jesse lead parallel, rarely intersecting lives. When they do meet, there is clear attraction, especially on Camille’s part. The camera goes into slow motion and a romantic song plays as she sees Jesse’s face. But attraction and mutual trauma isn’t the basis for a relationship. Especially when that relationship doesn’t begin until the literal last minute of the film. And the beginning of their relationship isn’t the most auspicious either. It’s that classic meet-cute of Camille seeing a passed out Jesse in a sauna, Jesse expressing that she wishes to die and the next thing we see, they’re kissing in a bed. Roll credits, we’ve got a romance for the ages.

Chinese Chocolate initially engaged me. It’s an interesting take on a love story to depict the prelude to it. And at least initially, this made the characters feel decently well-rounded. But that only worked for the first hour of this 108 minute film. The marketing of this film leans heavily on the relationship between the two women. But instead of showing us any of that, Chinese Chocolate would prefer you to see yet another scene about how men are shit towards them. I promise you, there’s more to a successful lesbian relationship than a mutual agreement that men are shit.

Overall rating: 5.1/10

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