The Velvet Café

I’ve never been entirely on board with the chocolate trend. Chocolate isn’t what it used to be. Nowadays it seems to get more praise the darker, bitterer and less accessible it is. The highest level of appraisal is when your immediate impulse is to spit it out. All I can say is that some PR person must have done a terrific job to talk us into this.

Personally I’m not ashamed to admit that I’m still a sucker for plain, traditional milk chocolate, old fashioned as it may be. It’s smooth, sweet and yet aromatic and it makes me relax unlike any other kind of food. Whenever I eat it I feel safe, protected and loved. It’s the adult equivalence of breast feeding I guess.

If we move into the world of movies, it also offers various types of chocolate, ranging from the overly sweet to the one that is so bitter that you only can digest it in smaller pieces. To me it’s not way or the other. I embrace both – the sweet and the bitter – depending on my current mood.

There are days when the very thought of a milk chocolate movie is sickening, days when all I want is to rub my skin against raw, miserable  reality. And then there are other days when I use the film as a soft, warm blanket where I can take cover, reassured that life is good, there’s hope for mankind and nothing can harm me for real.

About Time is definitely a milk chocolate movie, intended to be devoured on occasions when all you want to do is to hide under a blanket and comfort yourself with huge amounts of TV and sweets. It’s a movie to keep in the first aid box. In case of emergency: put it into the DVD player and it will distract you from all sorts of troubles including illness, computer breakdown and toothache.

The poster announces in large letters: “from the creator of Love Actually, Notting Hill, Four Weddings and a Funeral”. Usually I’m not a huge fan of this kind of marketing. Just because person X made movie Z, it doesn’t necessarily mean that movie Y will be more of the same. It can give a misleading impression.

But this is not the case with About Time. This is what I’d call a WYIIWYG movie: What You Imagine Is What You Get.

Your opinion about Love Actually, Notting Hill and Four Weddings and a Funeral matters to whether you should see it or not. If you:

• are a fan of the movies mentioned above
• can accept and enjoy time travelling in movies, when it’s closer to a fairy tale than to science (think Groundhog Day)
• use milk chocolate once in a while as a remedy for the burdens of life

… this film was made for you.

If you on the other hand think that milk chocolate is just for kids and you cringe at the thought of watching yet another quirky wedding – well, then you should probably move on. This film is not for you. You should stick to the dark side of life and the bitter chocolate, 85 per cent or more.

As for me, the choice is simple. Milk chocolate is an essential part of my movie diet. And so is Richard Curtis. I don’t usually buy movies, but I might very well get a copy of About Time once it comes out on DVD, just so I can keep it ready in the First Aid Kit. You never know when you’ll need it.

About Time (Richard Curtis, UK 2013) My rating: 4/5