A fable that wears its heart and liberal attitude on its sleeve, Swedish director Lasse Hallstrom's (The Cider House Rules) latest Hollywood foray has a lot of charm but is most notable for bringing two of Europe's greatest female actors together for the first time since 1988's The Unbearable Lightness of Being. France's Juliette Binoche won the Best Supporting Actress Oscar for her starring role in The English Patient, opposite Ralph Fiennes, and this is her first English-language role since then. Sweden's Lena Olin is, criminally, less well known, having had the misfortune of starring in such clunkers as Mr. Jones, opposite Richard Gere, and last year's execrable Mystery Men. Much of the pleasure in Chocolat comes from seeing these two beautiful women, (neither is an ingénue any longer-Binoche is 36 and Olin is 44) acting together so superbly once again.

And pleasure is what Hallstrom's movie is all about. Specifically the pleasure that comes from consuming one of the chocolate confections created by Vianne Rocher (Binoche), a mysterious woman who, with her daughter (Victoire Thivisol, so affecting in Ponette) alongside, arrives in a small French village, circa 1960. A staid and steadfast place, its inhabitants, led by the Comte de Reynaud (a wonderfully repressed Alfred Molina), pride themselves on their Catholic piety and their almost-Calvinist self-denial, a self-denial that extends even to the seemingly harmless-like Vianne's chocolate, for example. If the Count has his way she'll be "out of business by Easter" for having the effrontery to open her shop in his tranquil little burg-and during Lent, no less. Quel scandal!

It turns out that Vianne's bon-bons are not, however, your run of the mill Black Magic mixed assortment. Those who defy the Count's wishes-the aged Amande (Dame Judi Dench at her irascible and scene-stealing best), the battered wife Josephine (the wonderful Olin) and an assortment of other sinful locals-find their lives changed for the better, thanks to Vianne's magical creations. To make matters worse for Vianne, the Count and the pious townsfolk are doubly scandalized by Vianne's openness towards a motley collection of river rat gypsies, led by the incongruously named Roux (the de rigeur love interest, played by Johnny Depp, who assumes a very passable Irish accent, despite his French moniker). In the battle that looms between the Count and his conservative forces and the unrepentant Vianne-she's an unwed mother, for goodness sake!-guess who wins...?

That Chocolat is a fable is first signalled by the opening voiceover, "Once upon a time...", and then made obvious by Vianne and her daughter's entrance: into a town awash in cold blues, greys and the occasional green, they arrive swathed from head to toe in vibrant red. As a fable the film, for the most part, works, but its targets-the conservative policies of the Church and, in the person of the Count, the state-are such easy marks, that Vianne's eventual triumph seems foreordained, not to mention banal.

Compounding this problem is Hallstrom's directorial style. For a champion of the "liberal" causes he espouses both here and in The Cider House Rules-two films full of passionate people and anti-establishment agendas-Hallstrom is one of the most conservative filmmakers around. Heaven forbid that any of his scenes not be composed with a formal stateliness, or that his cinematography not stick absolutely to a paint-by-numbers colour scheme. Yes, the film is beautifully acted, and yes it "looks great" but Hallstrom's conservatism reminds me of a (rather uncharitable) review of Chocolat that a friend overseas reported reading: it's an art movie for people who don't like art movies...