Not just about food or kinky sex

Film lovers have reason to rejoice. Oscar-nominated films are being shown simultaneously in time for the Academy Awards on March 25.

Predicted to be the Best Picture winner is the period action drama, Gladiator from Ridley Scott of Hannibal. We really can’t understand why Hollywood is going overboard in lionizing it when there are other more worthy films, like Almost Famous, an autobiographical film from Cameron Crowe (Jerry Maguire) chronicling his experiences as a 15-year-old boy journalist for Rolling Stone. This is the best film we’ve seen about the ’70s rock ’n roll era, with excellent performances from Patrick Fugit as Crowe’s alter ego, and from Kate Hudson (Goldie Hawn’s daughter) as a groupie and Frances McDormand as Patrick’s overprotective mom. Kate and Frances are nominated as Oscar Best Supporting Actress, but the film itself was not even nominated in the Best Picture category. A big oversight. Is it because the film bombed at the tills and Oscar voters prefer box office hits like Gladiator, which raked in $180 million?

Another Oscar-nominated currently showing is Billy Elliot, a heartwarming story about the 11-year old son of a widowed coal miner in Northern England who is ordered to take boxing lessons and ends up being a ballet dancer. Jamie Bell is endearing in the title role. Julie Walters (Educating Rita) gives excellent support as his very supportive teacher, along with Gary Lewis as his macho father who initially cannot accept his son taking wimpy ballet lessons. The story unfolds with the industrial strife in Britain in the ’70s as its backdrop. Its director, Stephen Daldrey, is nominated in the Oscars, along with Walters.

Two acclaimed period films are now showing in metro simultaneously: Chocolat and Quills. Chocolat is a movie about food that will remind you of films like Like Water for Chocolate, Babette’s Feast and the recent Woman on Top. There’s a fabulous dinner scene which will truly make your mouth water. Directed by Lasse Hallstrom (My Life as a Dog, The Cider House Rules), it is a delightful confection even non-chocaholics will enjoy, a romantic parable inspired by the cocoa bean and its aphrodisiacal properties.

Set in 1959 in the quaint riverside French village of Lasquenet, it is a place where tradition rules and any kind of change is shunned, as supervised by its dominant mayor, the sanctimonious Comte de Reynaud (Alfred Molina). To this tranquil place, at the start of Lent, a stranger comes, Vianne Rocher (Juliette Binoche, The English Patient), with her daughter, Anouk (Victoire Thivisol, Ponette), driven there by the fickle north wind which earlier caused Vianne’s nomadic mom to leave her dad.

Vianne rents an apartment owned by the grouchy Armande (Judi Dench) and turns it into a chocolaterie. The mayor quickly orders all the villagers to boycott her shop, but Vianne’s sweet creations have a magical effect on those who get to taste them.

"I have just the thing for you," she tells her customers, giving them a particular chocolate for a particular predicament. Soon, a woman with a lackluster sex life is buying more chocos for her husband whose passion has just been revived. An old man (John Wood) too bashful to woo a widow (Leslie Caron) of four decades finally finds the courage to convey his affection through sweets.

Vianne also has a profound effect on Josephine (Lena Olin, Mrs. Lasse Hallstrom in real life), the battered wife of a brutish pub owner (Peter Stormare) who eventually summons the courage to dump him to work as Vianne’s assistant. She also helps patch the rift between the curmudgeony Armande and her estranged daughter, Caroline (Carrie Anne Moss, The Matrix), by asking Caroline’s son, Luc, to paint Armande in her shop. Vianne herself finds romance in a gypsy who travels by riverboat, Roux (Johnny Depp).

Screenwriter Robert Nelson Jacobs does an excellent job of adapting Joanne Harris’ novel for the big screen. He did the right thing in making one major change from the novel, which had the town priest as Vianne’s nemesis. In the film, the priest is turned into a self-righteous nobleman, Reynaud, who has the gall to correct even the homilies delivered by their priest, Pere Henri (Hugh O’Conor), who is in turn liberal enough to love the songs of Elvis Presley.

This takes the conflict between Vianne and Reynaud beyond church versus chocolate to something more universal: the conflict between people who want to express themselves freely and the hypocrites whose piety is very superficial.

The entire cast gives uniformly winning performances as smooth as buttery chocolate. Filmed on location in the medieval town of Flavigny in the south of France, another big asset is the fairy tale atmosphere set by Roger Pratt’s evocative cinematography which gives a lot of scenes a dreamy, nostalgic tone.

Like Chocolat, Quills is also set in France and is about the man from whom the word sadism was derived. Adapted by writer Doug Wright from his own play about the Marquis de Sade’s last few years in the Charenton Asylum for the insane, the film is not about kinky sex but about challenging adult questions regarding the suppression of intellectual freedom and the perennial conflict between the spirit and the flesh.

Directed by Phillip Kaufmann, best known for his adaptation of Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being (which, incidentally, also starred Juliette Binoche and Lena Olin of Chocolat), Quills presents de Sade as the Larry Flynt (Penthouse publisher whose life was also filmed) of his time.

With the help of a buxom maid, Madeleine (Kate Winslet), de Sade (Geoffrey Shine) smuggles his erotic writings and gets them published in Paris where they become best sellers. Emperor Napoleon is not pleased and sends Dr. Royer Collard (Michael Caine) to supervise the head of the asylum, Abbe Coulmier (Joaquin Phoenix), who cannot seem to control de Sade.

To spite Royer Collard, de Sade writes a scandalous play about the scandalous relationship of Collard with his child bride (the beautiful Amelia Warner) and has it performed by the inmates of the asylum. The irate Collard orders that de Sade be deprived of his quills and all other writing materials. The inventive de Sade then uses other means, like a wishbone and wine, then his own fingers and blood, and even his own excreta.

Collard, who has invented some dreadful torture machines, proves to be even more sadistic than de Sade himself. When de Sade transmits his work verbally with the help of the other inmates, his tongue is cut off. This is a scene surely not for the squeamish.

Also at the center of the film is the Abbe Coulmier’s unspoken love for Madeleine. That scene where he makes love to the dead body of Madeleine is both touching and repulsive, as he regrets suppressing his feelings for her.

Rush, the Oscar-winning Australian actor of Shine (which they will show on Channel 23, so don’t miss it), gives another brilliant performance as the very complex Marquis de Sade who has a wicked sense of humor, at once brilliant and vulgar. In real life, of course, he is not really a martyr of literary freedom but, by all accounts, a rapist of both boys and girls who used his aristocratic status in life to pursue a debauched life of sexual hedonism. Wright uses a lot of articistic license in telling his story, which maintains that repression and supression are the biggest crimes of all. You may or may not agree with his premise, but there is no denying that the movie says it all succintly.