Surface tensions: Race, costume and the politics of texture in Claire Denis’s Chocolat (1988)

This article examines the costumes of Claire Denis’s Chocolat. A highly aestheticized drama of pressed khaki uniforms and pith helmets in colonial Cameroon, clothing is, as this article argues, enfolded into a far broader topography of material power; it is an apparatus through which racialized and gendered difference is actively ‘fashioned’ for the screen. In Chocolat, it becomes clear that fashion and celluloid are intimately intertwined (‘sutured’ together, through Denis’s editing), with the bio-political containment of white femininity, historically underwritten by French society’s anxieties concerning racial miscegenation and sexual excesses in the colonies. Concurrently, however, dress also grants expression to transgressive currents of desire, which, in Denis’s provocative portrait of interracial attraction, intersect vividly with the sexual politics of fetishism. In the very fabrics of its material content – costumes, the pliable ‘skin’ of its images and the tissue of human relationships – Chocolat portrays colonial identity as deeply conflicted, and Denis affirms the material world as an agile and highly transgressive force in the theatre of colonial power.