"Better than Chocolate" isn't even better than pecan

COURTESY TRIMARK PICTURES Oooh, your hands are so incredibly soft. Are you using Curel?

Anne Wheeler's Better than Chocolate melts—not in your mouth—but in front of your eyes. At first, the movie presents itself as a teenage, lesbian version of La Cage Aux Folles. Its heroine is Maggie (Karyn Dwyer), a 19-year-old lesbian college drop-out who works at Ten Percent Books (the 10 percent reference, of course, has nothing to do with the price of the texts) and dances at The Cat's Ass, a lesbian club, on the side. She spends most of her time with her co-workers from both jobs, all of whom prove to be eccentric and predictable characters. Denise is a sexually aggressive and self-parodying bisexual. Frances is an uptight, unadventurous lesbian and the owner of Ten Percent. Judy is an outrageous (yet sensitive) transsexual who performs an act at the Cat's Ass which features the snarled repetition of the line, "I'm not a fucking transsexual."

Maggie's routine changes, though, when she meets Kim (Christina Cox), a traveling artist making a brief stop in the neighborhood. Kim lives out of a wildly decorated van which sports stickers with statements like, "girls rock; school sux." Despite her pensive, tough, and rather sullen demeanor, Kim is touchingly sentimental about her artwork. Maggie and Kim quickly fall in love and within a week (about six minutes by the manically fast pace of the movie), move in together and begin an idyllic existence of lovemaking and naked body painting.

Throughout the rest of the movie, we watch Maggie bounce cheerfully along in the face of various tribulations. Customs officials give the bookstore trouble about some of its more radical texts. Judy is distraught because since her operation, her parents will only communicate with her through their lawyer. The most significant hitch in Maggie's almost obnoxiously persistent happiness is her mother, Laila (Wendy Crewson). Laila has recently divorced her second husband and, after inviting herself to move in with her daughter, proceeds to make herself a neurotic, ardently heterosexual nuisance in Maggie's apartment.

Despite her mother's nagging presence, the resulting restrictions on her sex life, and troubles with her friends and work (not to mention the psychological turmoil expected from a teenager fresh out of the closet), Maggie remains confusingly perky. And though she leads an off-beat life filled with abnormal characters and situations not usually tackled by 19-year-olds, she is both naïve and dimensionless. Even in the face of real trauma (among other things, she is harassed by a hoodlums while protesting the confiscation of the bookstore's texts) Maggie's emotional life feels frustratingly shallow.

Ostensibly, the main point of the movie is a rather banal one, despite numerous trials and love triumphs for all of the characters. Even Laila, whose angst and sexual frustration result in an addiction to chocolate candies, ends up realizing herself sexually. Ultimately, the movie fails because it tries to be more than a poor Birdcage knock-off. Indeed, if it had contented itself with the quirky, manic tone with which it began, it would be bearable—albeit self-consciously skewed and very poorly acted. But Maggie can't seem to wipe a smile off her face even as she bursts into tears, and Kim's facial expressions deviate little from cute but excessive eyebrow furrowing. Even Judy, whose character leaves the most room for a truly flamboyant performance, is sadly uninspired.

Instead, the film attempts to tackle real issues—the inner life of an obviously complicated teenager and the difficulties, both internal and external, faced by homosexuals. These weighty subjects require versatile acting, subtle dialogue and a sophisticated plot, none of which the film possesses. We are wrenched too quickly from scenes of poorly executed farce, to overambitious melodrama that hints of a deeper intention. But the hints are too fragmented and the acting and dialogue too flimsy to support the weight. The film buckles under its clumsiness. Better than Chocolate doesn't know whether or not to take itself seriously, and it ends up failing from both ends.

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