HALLUCINOGENS FOR ALL : 'Chocolat' & 'Traffic'.

Lasse Hallstrom's Chocolat takes us to a village in France in 1959, where a mysterious woman named Vianne (Juliette Binoche) shows up with her young daughter and opens a sumptuous chocolaterie. Sounds innocent enough, yet soon the village hums with scandale. First of all, there's no husband in sight--it's Mademoiselle, not Madame, Vianne pertly corrects the prying mayor, and no, she won't be attending Mass. Meanwhile, customers find themselves strangely smitten by Vianne's sinfully good chocolate. "It melts ever so slowly on your tongue," exclaims one, "and tortures you with pleasure!"

European traditions stress chocolate's origins as an exotic New World import--even today, chocolate ads favor seductive themes--and it's this mythical quality Hallstrom is after. "What's the decor," quips Vianne's landlady (Judi Dench) in the new shop, "early Mexican brothel?" Indeed, Vianne's sweets contain a secret powder, traceable to South America, where years ago her father married a wild beauty and discovered a Mayan drink that could "unlock hidden yearnings." With this magic ingredient Vianne works an all-purpose salvage operation on the village's citizenry: giving a battered woman the strength to leave her brutish husband, drawing out the artist in a young boy suffering under a rigid mom, and blowing away amorous doldrums right and left.

Chocolat looks back to an earlier era in European novels and films, waxing nostalgic about the stultifying conformity of provincial life. Hallstrom delights in the moral jolt delivered by an unmarried mother who is not only pretty and defiant, but an atheist to boot, and in the Northern European romance of exotic (read: sexually free) southern lands and gypsy freedoms (represented here by a band of riverboat travelers, led by Johnny Depp). The Catholic church looms as a major joy killer, against which Vianne's regime of sweet seductions poses a kind of liberation chocology: we see the sacramental wafers placed on tongues in church, then cut to chocolate wafers melting on the tongues of her faithful.

In one hilarious scene, the mayor breaks into Vianne's store one night for a wild debauch--this priggish custodian of the public weal, in his tight vest, (played with cartoonish fun by Alfred Molina), waking sprawled in the display window the next morning, smeared with chocolate. Such episodes could have made for a delicious, racy comedy, a romp through the reckless ecstasies, and embarrassments, of sensual delight. Alas, Chocolat is too earnest and too tame for that. Hallstrom wants to charm us, and instruct us in the morality of pleasure, and uplift us too. A feel-good air of preaching to the converted drenches the film. In one cloying scene, the young village priest chucks his prepared Easter sermon to speak from the heart, exhorting his audience to "measure goodness by what we embrace, what we create, and what we include." In case we missed it, the narrator informs us that "the parishioners felt a new sensation that day--a lightening of the spirit."

Hallstrom's 1985 Swedish-language masterpiece, My Life as a Dog, was a luminous study of the joys and sorrows of childhood, and his earliest American films, Once Around and the underappreciated What's Eating Gilbert Grape?, consolidated his reputation as a director who could aim for the heart without pandering. All three of these films (and his more recent Cider House Rules) wisely counter an impulse toward the cute and the sentimental with something gritty or grotesque or absurd, or authentically hurt, and give us characters whose foibles, while endearing (Hallstrom loves eccentrics), reflect stubbornness or loneliness. Chocolat seems impatient with such complexity, eager to get to the sweet and simple core of things.

The move from realism to fable doesn't serve Hallstrom well. Cuteness runs rampant, leaving us in a fairyland village of wizened widows who flirt with the little old man (the one with a dog on a leash), who confesses his impure thoughts to the babyfaced village priest, and sings Elvis when no one is around. It's all so cute, right down to the little dog in the confessional, that even the statue in the village square can't suppress a magic-realist smile. Chocolat offers a quaintly Disneyfied Europe--complete with schoolboys standing on tiptoes, book satchels slung over their shoulders, to peep through Vianne's store window--that may establish Hallstrom as Europe's Norman Rockwell.

Where Hallstrom stamps his every film with a signature sensibility, Steven Soderbergh seems to defy notions of consistent directorial style. I would have bet the house that the person behind sex, lies and videotape couldn't also have done King of the Hill, a warmly heartrending tale of a Depression-era childhood; Out of Sight, a sexy Elmore Leonard adaptation with hip Tarantinoesque touches; and Erin Brockovich, a sympathetic portrayal of a single working mom. And then there are Kafka and Schizopolis, which I won't even try to summarize. Soderbergh is that rare crossover director, both art house and A-list.

Traffic, his sprawling saga of the drug wars, boasts the flashy new husband-wife team of Michael Douglas and Catherine Zeta-Jones, with quality actors--Dennis Quaid, Amy Irving, Albert Finney--snapping up secondary roles, and William Weld and Orrin Hatch in cameos. (When the politicians clamor for roles, you know you've gotten popular.) Adapted from a 1989 British TV miniseries, the film feels crammed to overflowing. The story weaves three plot strands, and Soderbergh, who did the camerawork himself, uses lighting and filters to lend a different look to each: sunwashed and lazy for L.A., where Zeta-Jones, a spoiled but ruthless trophy wife, copes with her husband's arrest for drug smuggling; austere blue for Washington, where Douglas plays a federal judge nominated as the new drug czar; and a thick tobacco brown, mottled and dangerous, for Mexico, where the exciting, golden-eyed Benicio Del Toro is a cop on the front lines of the drug war.

Keeping it all moving is no mean feat, but Soderbergh's control is superb. In contrast to the moral, political, and intellectual ruin it depicts, Traffic itself radiates confidence. Deft touches abound: disturbing images, like a teenage girl's tear of rapture when she freebases cocaine for the first time, and coy ironies, as when we listen to a table of women patter on about the delicious breast of duck served at their country club lunch, then casually pan past ducks on the lawn nearby--the eaters and the eaten. Soderbergh scores some points too easily, like the irony of Beltway mavens talking drug policy at a Georgetown cocktail party over cries of "Scotch and soda, please!" In fact, nothing in the film suggests that alcohol rivals the destructiveness of cocaine, which we see decimating lives in the most garish fashion. Traffic doesn't argue that drugs aren't a scourge; merely that we have no idea what to do about them. As the three main dramas develop, lives careen toward disaster and hopelessness surges. "You see the futility of what you're doing, and you do it anyway," a drug dealer berates the cop who arrests him. Enforcement, he points out, merely depresses the fortunes of some kingpins while elevating others: "You work for a drug dealer too." As the would-be drug czar whose naivete blinds him to his own daughter's addiction, Douglas is systematically harrowed for two-plus hours, then humbly renounces war-on-drugs metaphors ("I don't know how you wage war on your own family") and beats a chastised retreat, family in tow, to Al-Anon.

Traffic left me impressed, but curiously underwhelmed. Despite its panache, its brash look and feel, the stuff of the film seems pretty familiar. Does the Mexican general have to be so luridly corrupt? the drug czar's daughter a full-blown crack and heroin addict at sixteen? Suspended between drama and documentary, Traffic dissects vast, systemic problems while struggling to supply dramatic resolutions, and even a few redemptions, for its individual characters. It ends up being a little bit betwixt and between. But no matter. A big movie with a top-drawer cast, an ambitious and talented young director, a socially conscious theme, and plenty of hand wringing for all, Traffic may shake its head in despair at America's drug morass, but it sure knows the formula for Oscar.