The French expression être chocolat – to be thwarted, or foiled – comes from the late 19th-century Cuban-born clown who helped revolutionise the discipline as a pratfalling sidekick to Parisian star George Foottit. But it’s Chocolat, played with gangly exuberance by Omar Sy, who’s centre stage, and Foottit, played by Charlie Chaplin’s grandson James Thiérrée, the foil in this lavish and increasingly involving study of fin-de-siècle racism. Initially relying on spiritedly played circus hijinks to drive it forward, the film enters richer character study territory in its second half. Realising his victim role panders to the prejudices of the time, Chocolat – real name, Rafael Padilla – struggles to leave circus behind and play Othello. This never actually happened; compositing in other places too from hints in Padilla’s biography, Roschdy Zem and three other writers occasionally iron over complexities that might have strengthened their themes. Padilla’s wife, for example, wasn’t a saintly widowed nurse as in the film, but controversially left her first husband for him. But Hollywood-style big-top extravaganzas rarely pause for the details, not with Sy – yoking the charisma he displayed in Euro megahit The Intouchables to more sombre shades of introspection – easily able to hold the crowd.
