The crime caper takes an old-fashioned turn with this sweet-toothed whodunit.
ACTORS regularly step outside their comfort zones for roles. Occasionally they pig out, sometimes they starve themselves and often they're required to probe their darkest emotional recesses. But for Dripping in Chocolate, Louise Lombard had to learn how to make pralines.
''It was the best thing,'' says Lombard, the English actress best known for her role in CSI.
''It said on the schedule, 'Louise goes to chocolate school for the day.' I thought, 'That's a tough day.' I learnt some terms, like 'tempering'. And I learnt not to say CO-coa but co-COW.''
Commissioned by pay TV channel UKTV, Dripping in Chocolate is a film with an old-fashioned sensibility. It loosely sits in the film noir tradition, with all its moody atmospherics and sexual tension. In the words of co-writer/co-producer Sarah Smith, it's a tale of ''a chocolate shop, a murder mystery and a world-weary detective''.
''It's in the romantic detective genre,'' she says. ''This is a classic genre and we're giving it a modern take. Julie and I really like …''
''Chocolate,'' interrupts co-producer Julie McGauran.
''Yes,'' Smith says. ''And we both like murder mysteries. The word 'neo-noir' has been bandied about. And chocolate was the inspiration. The lushness of it and the fact it's addictive. And then we're using Sydney and all its colours.''
This isn't exactly film noir, then, but a slightly lighter shade. Let's call it film chocolat.
Lombard plays Juliana Lovece, proprietor of a boutique chocolate shop in The Rocks. One rainy night, to her ongoing inconvenience, a corpse is found in the laneway outside. The only clue is a wrapper from one of Juliana's choccies.
Enter David Wenham's character, a cop named Bennett O'Mara. His first challenge is to resist the temptation to eat potential evidence. His second is to solve the crime. As more praline-adorned bodies emerge, this involves deciding whether Juliana is as sweet as her produce or a calculating killer.
''Bennett O' Mara has recently been widowed,'' Wenham says. ''He's a little bit crumpled and he's putting himself through a bit of a detox, so he's doing it not terribly easy, but he's very proficient at what he does. And this for me is a really fun job. It's not going to fry any brain cells or put me through an emotional wringer. It's something I haven't really done before and it intrigued me. It's a whodunit, so there's a procedural element to it, but there's also a really interesting approach from director Mark Joffe with his film noir touch.''
Dripping in Chocolate comes with an impressive pedigree, both behind and in front of the camera. Joffe has directed five feature films, including The Man Who Sued God and Cosi. Smith and McGauran delivered solid ratings to Channel Seven with bushranger drama Wild Boys. Starring in the telemovie are Geoff Morrell, star of Grass Roots and the recent adaptation of Cloudstreet; Wenham, who has gone from Dan in SeaChange to Faramir in Lord of the Rings; and Lombard, whose has appeared in The House of Eliott and opposite Viggo Mortensen in Hidalgo. Which raises the obvious question: who is sexier as a co-star, Mortensen or Wenham?
''They're different,'' Lombard laughs. ''Very different. David has got an old-fashioned sort of gentlemanly way about him, which is incredibly sexy.''
For Lombard, co-starring with Wenham was only part of the appeal. Another was the fact she isn't playing a cop.
''I've been playing cops for so long,'' says the star of CSI, NCIS and other acronyms. ''So it's kinda nice to play the innocent - the person who says, 'Obviously I didn't do it, because I make chocolate.' It's nice to play the character who keeps saying things that incriminate herself because she assumes it's so apparent that she's innocent.
''There's a certain innocence and naivete to this in many ways. We're so used to seeing TV crime dramas, the CSI-style slick crime dramas, and this has a slightly old-fashioned take on the crime
genre. It's character-based, with relationships developing.''
For the LA-based Lombard, spending six weeks in Sydney late last year to shoot Dripping in Chocolate was a joy. She lived in Bronte, worked in The Rocks and learnt about chocolate-making.
''That says an awful lot about who the character is,'' she says. ''It's just such a wistful, beautiful thing to do - to be the kind of person who says, 'You know what? I'm going to do chocolate.'''
Does Lombard have any potential as a chocolatier?
''Well,'' she says, ''one of the ladies who came and helped us said I had the knack and could come and work for her at any time. Although when we were filming, everything went out the window. After one day, I'd obviously reached expert level and found my own method.''
From
here.
The Sydney Morning Herald