Magic meals and flaming passions
One of the most favorably reviewed and box-office successful foreign language films ever distributed in the United States, "Like Water for Chocolate" was the collaborative product of Mexican actor/director Alfonso Arau ("El Guapo" to fans of "Three Amigos") and his wife, Laura Esquivel, author of both the film's screenplay and the novel it was adapted from. Like the novel, the film's narrative materials show the heavy influence of "magic realism," a Latin American style of storytelling first popularized in North America and Europe in the late 1960s through the translation of the novels of Nobel laureate, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, especially his masterpiece, "One Hundred Years of Solitude."As with other works of magic realism, "Like Water for Chocolate" blends elements of realism, dream, and myth to create a world whose surface is mundane but where the fantastic emerges regularly and matter-of-factly. Much of the magic in "Like Water for Chocolate" is linked to cooking, an ordinary feminine domestic activity that becomes a powerful, preternatural vehicle for unleashing the heroine Tita's creativity and passion, both of which are repressed by the machismo culture and absurd female-binding traditions of early twentieth century Mexico.
Befitting the story's origins in the romance genre, passion is at the center of "Like Water for Chocolate." Indeed, the Spanish phrase "como agua para chocolate" is purportedly a familiar Mexican expression describing a person who is about to boil over with sexual desire. (The American expression "hornier than a hoot owl" is a non-culinary - and rather less romantic - equivalent metaphor.) Passion - its expression, repression, or absence - shapes not only Tita's life and marriage, but also the characterizations of the intimidating Mama Elena and of Tita's sisters, Rosaura and Gertrudis, contrasting foils in the matter of female sexuality. Rosaura is bound by paternalistic traditions of restraint and denial while Gertrudis becomes literally inflamed by sexual desire along with adapting a pre-feminist political assertiveness and egalitarianism.
Supporting the unfolding of this Mexican Cinderella tale, the cinematography of "Like Water for Chocolate" exhibits great range and beauty, by turns subtle and breathtaking. The film's lighting styles and color palette are equally effective either in establishing the fable-like mood of the stark Coahuila Desert or in detailing the more realistic ranch house where many of the interior scenes are set.
Topping all, of course, are the set pieces of Tita's sumptuous meals, endless quilt, and fiery bed, unforgettable images through which her sexual being is triumphantly expressed.
score 8/10
EThompsonUMD 8 February 2009
Reprint: https://www.imdb.com/review/rw2019871/35058
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