SWEET SURRENDER
A redoubtable director gets better and better.

CHOCOLAT
With Juliette Binoche, Judi Dench, Lena Olin, Alfred Molina
Screenplay by Robert Nelson Jones
Based on the novel by Joanna Harris
Directed by Lasse Hallström

JULIETTE BINOCHE IS PRETTY. So is Johnny Depp. And in Chocolat, a wry and poignant slice of life that winks at us and calls itself a fable, they naturally make a pretty couple.

But thankfully, their tangential love story only takes up a little bit of time in this confection about esteeming people for what they do and not for what they don't. Directed by Lasse Hallström (The Cider House Rules, My Life as a Dog), Chocolat is a pinch of Babette's Feast, a smidgen of anti-Catholic humanism, and a heaping helping of Mary Poppins, only this time for adults.

Our story literally begins "once upon a time," with the words of a narrator whose identity we won't learn until the very end. Her tranquil ghostly voice sounds like it comes from another plane of existence as it introduces us to the town and people of Lansquenet, an isolated French village that sits, circa 1959, like so many others, atop a slope surrounded by an ancient fortified wall of stone.

We learn from the start that Lansquenet is ruled by God, whose earthly helper is the intractable Comte de Reynaud (Alfred Molina), who each week edits and revises the sermons written by the town's malleable infant priest. Then a sly north wind blows in, and with it comes an outsider, Vianne (Binoche), and her spirited little daughter Anouk. Vianne rents an abandoned pastry shop from Armande (Judi Dench), the building's owner, and proceeds to turn it into a chocolaterie, making candy and pastry so sinfully delicious that Reynaud immediately labels her the Devil.

As it turns out, Lansquenet has plenty of blemishes hidden behind its repressed half-smiles. Everyone thinks Josephine (Lena Olin), who wanders around town mumbling to herself, is a crazy woman, but we soon learn she's an abused and frightened spouse married to Serge (Peter Stormare), a drunk who owns the local bar. The cranky old Armande can't visit her grandson, a boy with extraordinary artistic talent (he draws dead people), because the boy's uptight mother doesn't want her child consorting with his libertine granny.

Things get even more perplexing for Reynaud when he can't intimidate every single citizen into avoiding Vianne's chocolate shop, even during the holy Lenten season (an intrepid time for Vianne to open her shop in the first place). And then, up the river on a tinny raft, comes Roux (Depp), a reprobate Irishman with a guitar and a band of gypsy-like followers.

Needless to say, Vianne eventually loosens up this taciturn village with her demi-magic candy and her serene life force. In fact, Binoche's wispy performance in Chocolat, as always for this oddly remote actress (she won an Oscar for The English Patient), is like the wind that brings her character to town: You can feel her presence but can't quite see or touch it.

The rest of Hallström's superb actors - especially Dench and Olin - have much more flesh and bone, and with his unparalleled gift for intimacy and his ultra-sensitive direction, he makes the smallest moments practically weep with humanity.

When Josephine finds her courage, or when Armande meets secretly with her grandson, or when an old man in town finally courts a long-mourning widow - Leslie Caron, in a virtual cameo, her radiant face still round and petite - Chocolat blossoms as a fairy tale on the Grimm side of Mother Goose. The movie does its best when the story gets melancholy and real, while its metaphors teeter precariously on the head of a pin, except for the final one, an ironic flash that carries its weight and beautifully sums up the movie's driving theme.

Hallström, who began his career directing ABBA videos, seems to have found his niche telling quirky tales about isolated places where people either live vigorously or need to have their sense of joie-de-vivre restored by an outsider. He's become as close to a sure thing as we have in commercial cinema, and if he can make something decent of his next movie, an adaptation of Annie Proulx's cloying novel The Shipping News, then he'll surely prove himself to be a cinematic genius.