The scene where Aimée Dalens stands in front of the mirror and Protée is helping her to dress is one of the most significant cinematic elements in representing the theme of desire in Chocolat. This scene vividly conveys sensual tension between Aimée, a beautiful white woman, and Protée, a handsome black man serving his white masters, the Dalens, in their house. This sensuality in this film was noted and praised by film critics. Viewers clearly see the reflection of both these people in the mirror, creating an intensely peeping effect. The spectators watch how the white female provokes the black man, who is stone-faced, and barely dares to look in her face, and speak to her.
Aimée is partially dressed, with part of her back exposed, and is asking her servant for help in this most private of situations. She is attracting his attention to her body, indulging her sexual desire, which is almost palpable. Aimée Dalens knows how much power she wields over Protée, and therefore, she acts as the provocateur. It looks like Aimée thinks that the servant is there to satisfy her every wish. The white female does not hide from Protée her attitude to him, and she openly regards her servant as the sexual object her longing is concentrated on.
Then comes a troubling scene when Protée kicks a monkey at the Dalens’ dining table. The scene relates how his sexual desire aimed at Aimée, finding no natural realization, manifests itself. The viewers get the idea of the tension Protée experiences, but Aimée seems to care little for her servant’s feelings, concerns, and anxieties.
In the night scenes, first outside the house, then in the white woman’s bedroom, she continues to try to seduce Protée appearing in front of him in her nightgown. Aimée is staring at the servant’s semi-naked muscular black body, and he is gazing back at her. These long gazes are critical to Denis – according to Eschkötter “it has been her [Denis’s] concern to show French colonial history and its geopolitical effects as an affair of gazes and touches.” The director is preoccupied with issues of forbidden desires and attempts to cross the line of what is allowed. Despite all the emotional dynamics charged with sensuality, Aimée’s attempt at seduction is unsuccessful again, but she seems unwilling to stop at that.
The more Protée ignores Aimée’s yearning for him, the less comfortable the situation is for her. Both participants of this tense affair in Chocolat seem to be trapped in it. The white female cannot resist the temptation to be sexually involved with the young man depending on her. She is ready to cross this line of a close relationship with a colonized person but is unprepared to be rejected. Protée cannot avoid Aimée’s presence, her insistence on staying tête-à-tête with him and her sexual advances, but he does not give in to them. Both protagonists are, in a sense, freed from the trap in the scene where the Dalens are expecting a male guest, which exposes Aimée’s attitude to Protée to a group of people in the house. The incident angers the black servant, and a fight between the men ensues. The viewers see that Aimée is distraught by what has happened. When she is one-on-one with the servant in the dining room, she cannot help but touch his legs caressingly. Now it is an open demonstration of her feminine attraction to Protée, but he firmly rejects her. In this scene, he once again ignores his female master’s sexual attention, finishes his job about the house, and lifts Aimée from the floor as if nothing is happening between them. The film viewers are to decide for themselves what the reasons are for the servant to spurn his female master.
Having angered the white woman, Protée is relegated to a lower position of a servant who lives and works outside the white masters’ house. The black man appears to be unperturbed by this change as it has freed him from Aimée’s sexual advances, confines of the masters’ house, and the spectators see Protée being outside, watching the horizon and vast spaces of Cameroon.