Line #26 Film/Chocolate


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2	%%Image selected per Image Pickin' thread: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/posts.php?discussion=1642441115089787700
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5	[[quoteright:350:https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/chocolate1.jpg]]
6	[[caption-width-right:350:Autistic [[{{Pun}} Savate]] Syndrome.]]
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8	A 2008 Thai film about an autistic girl who goes after her ailing mother's debtors to pay for her chemotherapy.
9
10	A Thai woman falls in love with a Japanese gangster, but they part ways after her employers disapprove... with violence. A few months after the split, she gives birth to Zen, a girl with autism. Said autism allows Zen to master martial arts moves by watching them. She also enjoys chocolate, [[TrivialTitle thus the title.]]
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12	When Zen's in her teenage years, her mother gets cancer and needs money for treatment. Zen's friend (and occasional caretaker) Moom finds a black book listing everyone who owed her mother money from her days as an enforcer. They head out to reclaim it... with violence.
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14	Unfortunately, those people are with the same criminals that split up Zen's parents, and they're still hungry for revenge...
15
16	(For the 2000 film about a chocolaterie in a French village, see ''Film/{{Chocolat}}''.)
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18	----
19	!!This movie provides examples of:
20
21	* ActionGirl: Zen. Zin was a DarkActionGirl in the backstory, or possibly a DragonLady.
22	* AgonyOfTheFeet: During Zen's acrimonious departure at the start of the film, her boss shoots his own big toe off to show Zin just what she's done to him. [[spoiler:He later cuts one of Zin's toes off when he finds out she's still contacting her yakuza boyfriend.]]
23
24	* AntiHero: Zen and Moom have a good cause... but they're basically collecting money owed to the mob for their own personal use.
25	* ArtisticLicenseBiology:
26	** Autism tends to impair motor skills: even although many autistic people are good in either fine or gross motor skills, they are often deficient in the other. Martial arts usually require both, so it would be unrealistic (though admittedly not impossible) to expect an autistic girl to be a fighting savant.
27	** Same with Tourette's. Thomas's chronic spasms would make it ''very'' hard for him to learn and/or train martial arts, not to mention an incredibly complex one as it is capoeira. It gets HandWaved in the film because it's never explicitly stated that his disorder is Tourette's (he's even credited as "Epileptic Boxer", which is another level of artistic license altogether, as epilepsy is a completely different thing).
28	* AwesomeByAnalysis: Zen's specialty, as she can learn martial arts only by watching and shadowboxing what she watches. It doesn't end there, as she also applies it while fighting in order to land precise strikes and remove her body out of danger with CombatParkour every time it is needed. This is why Thomas manages to confuse her for a round: his spasms make it hard for her to analyze his movements, and it takes time for her to readjust.
29	* BadassAdorable: Zen, a small Thai autistic girl whose DisabilitySuperpower is to absorb martial arts from movies and TV shows. The entire movie is her beating up hundreds of people larger than her with UsefulNotes/MuayThai. The actress supposedly spent 2 years learning enough of the art to make it look realistic.
30	* BadassFamily: Dad's a (very good) gangster. Mom... had moves before the cancer. Their kid is unstoppable.
31	* BigDamnHeroes: A few examples. The most hilarious (and overt) being Moom saving the day by... scaring away the flies using an electric flyswatter, thus allowing Zen to mop the floor with the people she's extorting money from.
32	* BittersweetEnding: [[spoiler:Zen's mother is killed by the main villain. However, by this point, Zen has defeated everyone who stood against them... so her father doesn't have to leave again, and she is reunited with him.]]
33	* TheBladeAlwaysLandsPointyEndIn:
34	** Played straight many times in the butcher shop fight, but notably subverted at one point. Zen deflects a thrown knife at a mook who was already victim to this trope. You see his face and reaction when he's hit... then the camera pans downward and it turns out it merely slapped him with the side of the blade.
35	** Earlier in the same fight, the blade ''didn't'' land pointy end in on a chain-link barricade, but did when it [[ThrowingYourSwordAlwaysWorks bounced off and hit the mook who threw it...]]
36	* ChekhovsGun: "Flies!" Set up when Moom tries to teach Zen to use it as a cue for dodging incoming projectiles (and is interrupted when he tries to test it with a baseball); fired when [[spoiler:he yells it in time for her to dodge a bullet]].
37	* CombatParkour: Zen uses her small size to her advantage by taking the fight into narrow spaces where her opponents have trouble moving. She and her opponents also employ combat parkour in places when evading kicks and bouncing around the scenes.
38	* CombatPragmatist: Played straight, then subverted. Mooks swarm into the room with katanas drawn, and it looks like it's going to be an epic sword fight between them and Zen's father, until [[spoiler: he pulls a gun and empties into their ranks]]. For the subversion, he grabs a blade of his own and fights the rest traditionally.
39	* ConfusionFu: Zen's most dangerous enemy is Thomas, a boy with Tourette's. Not only he is skilled at a deliberately confusing martial art, his tics make it almost impossible for her to read his moves anyway.
40	* ConservationOfNinjutsu: Zen goes through {{mooks}} like it's nothing, but has difficulty in her singles duel with Thomas and is eventually taken out in a double KO. Justified because he is a KungFuProofMook for her, while the rest are regular thugs, and she was probably tired of fighting the latter by this point.
41	* CoolVsAwesome: Zen vs. Thomas is this, as it effectively pits two fighting savants with very divergent styles against each other.
42	* CursedWithAwesome: Autism, as well as Tourette's.
43	* CuteBruiser: Zen of course.
44	* DanceBattler: It is not easy to call "dance" to Thomas's spastic fighting style, but he actually fights with an adapted form of UsefulNotes/{{Capoeira}}, mixed with some b-boying.
45	* DisabilitySuperpower: Zen is autistic... which gives her almost superhuman senses. Same for Thomas, who has some sort of Tourette that makes him physically unpredictable.
46	* DisneyAcidSequence: The film features an [[DreamBallet animated dream sequence]] which moves Zen to act.
47	* DoubleKnockout: Zen and Thomas feature one at the final moments of the fight, as they both land simultaneously a ''martelo do chao'' and drop groggy to the ground. A variation happens immediately after, when Zen lands a ''mariposa'' kick while Thomas was trying to sweep her legs: although his attack misses, the battle wear finally catches up with Zen and she collapses next to him upon landing.
48	* TheDragon: Thomas.
49	* EvilCounterpart: Thomas counts as one to Zen.
50	* ExtremityExtremist: The capoerista Thomas only attacks with his legs, aside from some rare hand strike here and there.
51	* ForceAndFinesse: Zen's specialty is traditional muay thai, favoring committed lunges with a lot of forward knees, kicks, and elbows (the Force). On the other hand, Thomas flows around with modified capoeira, combining evasive acrobatics with elegant long-range kicks (the Finesse).
52	* FunnyBruceLeeNoises: Zen makes these when she's enjoying herself. Stands to reason since she watched a lot of Bruce Lee – although we only ''see'' her watch his instruction videos, where he may have skipped the noises.
53	* GirlsLoveChocolate: Played straight with Zen.
54	* GlassCannon: Thomas is one of those combined with a FragileSpeedster. He can deliver heavily torqued kicks from unpredictable angles and is very difficult to hit even by a savant like Zen, but he cannot take nearly as much damage as she can. It only takes a couple of well-placed knockouts to take him out of the battle, while Zen by then had tanked through much more damage than that against him (and not even counting her fights with the other mooks).
55	* GoodOldFisticuffs: Zen uses them frequently.
56	* HeroicSecondWind: Played twice at high-speed in the final duel. The drama increases at the end because Thomas is so damn adaptable that he ''keeps'' outgunning Zen even after she decodes his body language, which previously seemed to be the key to beat him; it is only when Zen goes further and starts directly copying his style that she finally starts landing finishing blows.
57	* HilariousOuttakes: In the vein of Jackie Chan, as they're actually footage of on-set injuries.
58	* HollywoodTourettes: Averted. Thomas barely talks in the film, but he never swears as classically expected from a character with Tourette's.
59	* IKnowMortalKombat: Zen primarily learns martial arts watching Creator/BruceLee and Creator/TonyJaa movies. Apparently including training videos, like in the clip that shows her absorbing every movement. Additionally, there is a muay thai class training near her house that she seems to audit without their knowledge.
60	* ImportantHaircut: Zen cuts off her beautiful long hair after she finds out her mother is going bald from chemotherapy. [[spoiler:She had pulled off her mother's wig and, in a series of flashbacks to times she'd played with her mother's hair, though she'd torn off her mom's real hair. She was apparently acting out because of the trauma.]]
61	* InformedAttribute: Thomas is credited as the "Epileptic Boxer", which is quite misguided considering he is neither a boxer nor epileptic.
62	* ItsNotYouItsMyEnemies: The reason Zen's parents aren't together. If they so much as communicate in a letter, it angers the BigBad.
63	* KickTheDog: Number Eight [[spoiler:on Zen, ''in her face'', as she tries to revive her mortally-wounded mother.]]
64	* KungFuKid: Both Zen and Thomas, in their respective fields of expertise.
65	* KungFuProofMook: A literal example in Thomas, who proves to be a match for Zen precisely because he is disabled too and just as gifted for martial arts as she is. Even after she finds the way to land some hard strikes on him, he manages to pull a draw and take her out of action (although to be fair, she was already worn due to an earlier fight against bunch of mooks).
66	* LightningBruiser: Zen might not be as mobile, but she is tougher and hits just as hard, and has also some incredible CombatParkour ability.
67	%%* LittleMissBadass: Zen.
68	* LoanShark: Zen and Moom, are, effectively, acting as enforcers for the mob's loans and keeping the money.
69	* MalignedMixedMarriage: Less because it's a marriage between a Japanese man and a Thai woman, more because it's between a yakuza and a Thai enforcer.
70	%%* MartialArtsMovie: Duh.
71	* MoodWhiplash: The penultimate scene consists of Zen's mother dying before her eyes and Zen trying to [[PleaseWakeUp wake her up]] with her father watching. The last scene is Zen calmly walking with her father in broad daylight, holding a paper windmill.
72	* NiceJobBreakingItHero: Zen and Moom collecting debts is essentially stealing from the mob, which puts them back on Number Eight's radar.
73	* NonActionGuy: Moom qualifies, while he occasionally contributes in fight scenes, for the most part, he simply keeps out of Zen's way.
74	* NonIndicativeTitle: Zen does enjoy chocolate, and it shows up in several scenes, however, it's never a plot point and a very random choice for a title.
75	* OminousHairLoss: The severity of the cancer is made clear to her when Zen learns her mother is now wearing a wig and her hair has been falling out as a result of the chemotherapy,
76	* OneWordTitle: It's named ''Chocolate'' because the main character likes the stuff.
77	* PacManFever: Zen's playing a [=PS2=] with a Super Famicom controller at one point.
78	* PowerCopying: Zen shows it during her battle against Thomas, albeit with a lot of effort due to her opponent's body language being difficult to read. She adopts a capoeira approach to match his style, immediately landing a DoubleKnockout, and manages to finish him with a ''mariposa''. Possibly subverted, thought, because that's strangely a capoeira move Thomas had ''not'' used previously, which implies Zen had some prior knowledge of the art and only recalled it for her change of style.
79	* QuirkyMinibossSquad: The Thai mob seems to employ a QMS of transvestites.
80	* RealityIsUnrealistic: Zen's WaifFu moves look like they shouldn't pack that much weight... until you see the HilariousOuttakes and you see that when her blows hit the stuntmen, they do some serious damage.
81	* SexyFlaw: This is explicitly one of the reasons that a [[StarCrossedLovers yakuza fell in love with a Thai mob enforcer]]: the yakuza has a fascination with "imperfections" and in this case he found the enforcer's scar on her face to be alluring.
82	* SweetTooth: Zen, it's why the movie is named what it's named.
83	* TattooedCrook: Zin and Masashi are both tattooed prominently on their torsos, as seen when they have sex. She's Thai and he's Japanese, both dangerous gangsters.
84	* TrademarkFavoriteFood: Zen loves chocolate. At one point the gangsters [[{{Squick}} use it against her]].
85	* TrivialTitle: The movie is about an autistic girl beating people up to pay for her mother's chemotherapy. She also happens to like chocolate, though that doesn't affect the plot in the slightest aside from drama.
86	* UnholyMatrimony: Zin and Masashi are both hardened gangsters who fall genuinely in love, to anger from Zin's boss. The two conceive a daughter and try to keep a relationship despite being driven apart.
87	* WaifFu: Done well for the most part. Zen has to build up momentum be able to knock back her opponents more than a few inches. See RealityIsUnrealistic.
88	* WhatHappenedToTheMouse: Moom in the very final scene, especially since he was [[spoiler:pretty badly wounded]]. Also, Thomas's fate is unrevealed.
89	* WindTurbinePower: The end sees Zen and her father walking along the ocean with a row of wind turbines at their side as she holds her own little pinwheel.
90	* WhyDidItHaveToBeSnakes: Zen ''hates'' flies.
91	* {{Yakuza}}: Zen's dad Masashi.

Context Film / Chocolate