I Would Like to See It: Like Water for Chocolate

I’m beginning to suspect that if you’re not a complete dunce, filming food and cooking is a pretty good way to ensure your movie feels richly sensual and intimate. Food is a shorthand for all kinds of foundational human emotions and relationship patterns, a visual language more immediately intelligible than heraldry, more universal than pictograms or letters. Alfonso Arau’s adaptation of Laura Esquival’s Like Water for Chocolate literally sublimates its characters’ emotions into the food they make. A cake imbued with the sadness of a brokenhearted Tita’s (Lumi Cavazos) tears makes wedding guests recall their own lost loves with aching poignancy. Quail in rose petal sauce spiced with a few drops of Tita’s arduous blood drawn by the roses’ thorns lets her entire family feel the lust she harbors for her sister’s husband Pedro (Marco Leonardi). Tita’s sister Gertrudis (Claudette Maillé) is so overcome that her body heat sets fire to the family’s bathhouse and the smell of her molten arousal summons a Mexican revolutionary with whom she had exchanged glances earlier that day. He carries her off on his horse, the only instance in a film so deeply interested in the rigid oppression of gender roles in which someone simply does what they want to do.

This conflict between filial duty and romantic love is central to the film. In practice it often plays as trite, ginned-up tension between first loving, gracious Tita and hidebound Mama Elena (Regina Torné) who abandoned her own happiness to hew to convention and then, after Elena’s death, between Tita and her bitter sister Rosaura (Yareli Arizmendi), a dull and venal woman who falls back on stifling family tradition when her husband Pedro, who married her only to be close to Tita — herself prevented from marrying by the familial custom of the youngest daughter living only to care for her mother —- proves unfulfilling. Like Water for Chocolate has little time for these damaged women, electing instead to spend its time painting Tita as saintly and long-suffering, able to lactate through sheer will and love for her niece and nephew, the former of whom is literally poisoned to death by his birth mother Rosaura’s care. The point, of course, in the film’s magical realist framework, is that our mindsets and personalities manifest invisibly in the world around us, but the overall effect is turgidly moralistic.

Cavazos’ natural charisma does a great deal to tamp down the worst of this deceptively mystical preachiness, but the damage done by the film’s paper-thin character work is too extensive to fully obscure. When someone is bad and too connected to tradition, she gets fat and flatulent and then literally dies from farting too hard. When someone is good and defies expectations, she’s effortlessly beautiful and dies in a romantic blaze after finally joining with her lifelong love. It’s all part of a great big symbolic mosaic in which individuality burns down the repressive walls of the family home but leaves behind a new form of heredity — Tita’s cookbook — which is generative rather than restrictive, a conclusion which might play better had the film made its antagonistic figures something more than scowling Charlie Brown adults wah-wah-ing about how no one is allowed to have fun.