Dark molasses If I'm not mistaken, in the 80s it was quite fashionable in American cinema to make films about school as models of aggression, violence and dictatorship - sometimes in the spirit of the fantastic dystopias of George Orwell. For Russian video fans, the most striking example of this kind was the painting by Mark Lester “Class 1984”. With some delay, something similar appeared in our movies of the 90s. So the gloomy “Chocolate riot” tells a phantasmagoric story about a certain provincial school, the director of which, together with his assistants, is engaged in the mafia business, and in his free time turns the educational institution subordinate to him into a barracks with strict orders, a system of eavesdropping, denunciations and other abominations ... All this ends with a great fire and a riot of students.
I was ambiguously impressed by this strange film, deliberately shot in very gloomy tones a year before the collapse of the Soviet Union, which practically predicted this event in episodes of the school burning by students. The school is completely run by the mafia, and the plough, albeit symbolic, at which boys in school suits and girls in brown school uniforms are chopped (no, not heads, fortunately, but much scarier) souls. Lord, it is good that all this did not come true, but we were, if we judge, at some point from such uncomfortable prophecies. The Sverdlovsk film studio of the late nineties, before it fell silent for almost twenty years, managed to produce at that time several fantastic and mystical masterpieces, in which the lack of special effects was replaced by such a prophetic psychedelic; “The abduction of a sorcererer” (1989), “Chocolate riot” (1990), “It’s the opposite” (1990)
The film contains allusions to the apocalypse, but this, by the way, is characteristic of the semi-fantastic dramas of the early nineties, at the beginning of the film, the motif of the universal apocalyptic prostitute sounds clearly. The fusion of the film - metaphors and a film full of alarming forebodings about the near future with school drama is very unusual, but it is here justified. For the institute of the Soviet school is shown here as an inquisitorial self-contained and terrible model of the world, alas, almost without any way out (and the whole film, by the way, including the fire scene, is shot intentionally in very gloomy tones), which is inherent in many fantastic dramas of those years (example "The Mediator").
And the way out of here, alas, one – on the cliff, where the students, although they do not cut their heads, but their souls are cut into shreds, this is definitely one of the most terrible episodes of the film. And as the leitmotif of this whole nightmare - an explosion of indignation of children, which grew into a semi-mad rebellion with the burning of the hated school as the main bulwark of the punitive system. And no one could have imagined that only a year remained before the collapse of a great country. The film ends on the right piercing note; the main character of the girl in a school dress half-burnt on her sobs on the chest of the main instigator of the riot, love won again, the system shattered, but for how long?