Like Water For Chocolate Review

Adapted from her own novel by actress-writer Laura Esquivel (Tacos de oro, Entelineas) and directed by her husband Alfonso Arau (perhaps best known to American moviegoers as the Mexican bandit "El Guapo" in The Three Amigos!), Como agua para chocolate is a Mexican version of the Cinderella story, in which a bitter matriarch insists that her youngest daughter has to follow a family tradition and give up any notions of marriage or love and care for her till she dies.

The movie starts in the Mexico of the early 1900s: Revolution is in the air already, and the wealthy Mama Elena is giving birth to her third and youngest daughter Tita (who'll be played by several actresses but will eventually be fleshed out by Lumi Cavazos).  

Mama Elena's ranch-owning husband, meanwhile, is being congratulated for becoming a father again...until someone comes and whispers in his ears that his lovely blonde wife has been doing it with a dark-skinned man.  Of course, this news doesn't sit well with Mama Elena's husband; indeed, it kills him on the day of the last baby's birth.

Mama Elena, played excellently by Regina Tome, is - of course - consumed by guilt by this, but the guilt becomes a bitter anger that is focused on Tita, who may or may not have been the fruit of her aduklterous affair.  Mama Elena dotes on her older daughters Rosaura (Yareli Arizmendi) and Gertrudis (Claudette Maille) but delegates the raising of Tita to Nacha (Ada Carrasco) the mestizo cook who prepares all kinds of yummy foods for Mama Elena and her daughters.

Nacha: You will be so beautiful that the first boy who sees you will want to marry you.
Mamá Elena: Nacha! Don't say that. As my youngest daughter, Tita will care for me until the day I die. She won't marry.

As in the Cinderella story, there's a Prince Charming of sorts: Pedro, a boy from a nearby estate who falls in love with Tita when they're both children.  They first see each other when they're nine, but eventually he'll grow up to be played by Marco Leonardi, an Italian actor who has appeared in Cinema Paradiso and Once Upon a Time in Mexico.

Alas, Mama Elena's tyrannical rule that family tradition trumps love nixes any hopes for Pedro to marry Tita, so the young man proposes a compromise.  To be near Tita, he will marry Rosaura instead.

In a conventional narrative, this would never really be believable.  Mama Elena - a shrew so mean and evil that even Petrucchio himself could not tame - would have been too wily to be fooled by this and said "No," and Rosaura would have insisted that they move far, far away, maybe even to another galaxy, to separate her hunky husband from her virginally beautiful younger sister.

But Esquivel's story is not a conventional narrative; it's a fable of love, sex, food and "magical realism," and Tita - the often downtrodden and despised child who has been relegated to being Mama Elena's scullery maid - has the most unusual gift: she can impart her innermost emotions to the dishes she has learned to prepare in Nacha's homey kitchen.

Thus, if Tita feels unhappy and cries while fixing dinner, the salt from her tears will be added to the ingredients.  Anyone who eats the dish will - sooner or later - be caught in the grip of great melancholy and start to cry.

Likewise, if she gets the hots for Pedro and accidentally gets some of her blood into some quail with rose petal sauce (an actual dish, too!), well, then everyone gets pretty horny...even the local priest.

Como agua para chocolate takes place over a 30-year span of time and there are lots of other subplots - some funny, some tragic - which encompass the upheaval of the Mexican Revolution and its aftermath. 

At its heart, the film is a mix of Latin American magical realism and some of the best-known love stories in which forbidden passions and evil stepmothers (or evil mothers, period) take center stage.  Savvy viewers will see touches of Shakespeare and the Grimm Brothers' Snow White tale added in, with a touch of sensuality added for good measure.

Though there are dubbed editions out there on VHS and maybe even DVD, I recommend this movie be watched in its Spanish-language DVD with English subtitles instead.  Sure, it's pretty challenging for many viewers to listen in one language and read in another, but to me a dubbed soundtrack always sounds, well, artificial and over-acted. 

In the end, though, even if viewers want to watch it in dubbed editions it won't matter.  Como agua para chocolate has it all - fine directing by Arau, a wonderful and sensitive screenplay by Esquivel and awesome performances by the entire cast.  It's clearly a movie which deserves its reputation as one of the most popular foreign films to hit these (and other) shores, one that will be long remembered after its last fade out and the word FIN appears on screen.