Better Than Chocolate

GirlFix Points: 24

Better Than Chocolate centres around nineteen-year-old Maggie (Karyn Dwyer), a bright, effervescent and idealistic young woman who drops out of university and begins working in a lesbian bookstore on Vancouver's Commercial Drive.

There she works for the shy Frances (Ann-Marie MacDonald), whose shipments of books are constantly confiscated by Canada Customs officials, and meets the salaciously bisexual Carla (Marya Delver).

Maggie falls head over heels for Kim (Christina Cox), an itinerant artist who lives in her van, but their passionate romance is interrupted by the arrival of Maggie's mother, Lila (Wendy Crewson), and her younger brother, Paul (Kevin Mundy), who come to live with Maggie after Lila's second marriage falls through.

Maggie, whose blithely clueless mother doesn't know she is gay, tries to fend off questions about her place of employment, her new best friend and the box of sex toys under the bed.

While Maggie struggles to maintain her relationship with Kim under the strain of Mum's constant prying, Frances fends off the advances of the sensitive, transgendered Judy (Peter Outerbridge), an inquisitive Paul succumbs to the advances of Carla, the increasingly open-minded Lila wears out the batteries on the sex toys, and a gang of gay-bashing skinheads causes trouble for the bookstore.

Better Than Chocolate is a light-hearted date movie targeted at young gay women (the filmmakers utilised a focus group of twelve young lesbian women whose opinions informed the development of the script). It is a breezy, feel-good romantic comedy that is genuinely amusing, angst-free and accessible to all sexual orientations.

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