Like Water for Chocolate

Tita is the youngest one in the family and her love for Pedro has no future. In Mexico tradition demands that the youngest daughter refrains from getting married. Instead she is to take care of her old parents. In order to at least be close to Tita, Pedro marries her older sister Rosaura. Tita has a magical way of ''spicing'' the food she cooks with her feelings, feelings that are immediately transferred to those who eat her food. The story develops into a struggle between the tyrannical mother and the invincible love.

Comment:
To be born in a kitchen can have unsuspected effects. At least if you happen to be born in Mexico at the turn of the century. The mother Elena gives birth to her third daughter Tita, whose destiny it is to remain unmarried and take care of her mother for the rest of her life. I shudder at the thought. So does Tita. Especially since she loves Pedro and he loves her. Tita witnesses her sister's wedding with that same man; now she can at least be near him! But what do you do with your restrained lust? You go by way of the kitchen, where everything began and where it can all come to an end. For food is not just food. Food can become something completely different when prepared with great love.
When Tita cries in the batter of the wedding cake, the result is that all who eat the cake are overwhelmed by an incredible longing for their first love and cry until they
get sick. This is nothing unnatural. We are in a world of virgin breasts filled with milk and erotic rose sauce which excites sister number two, to the extent of making her elope naked with a guerilla leader. When the rationality of the West meets the spirituality of the South we have something that is called a cultural clash. Like Water for Chocolate presents us With a wonderful clash. The film reminds me of Babette's Feast, partly because of all the food, but mainly because of the memory of my first inverted cultural clash; Western rationality seen from the perspective of African spirituality.
I saw the film Babette's Feast in downtown Maputo, Mozambique. At last some simple Danish! Being a friend of Western order, expected a silent audience that would laugh in the right places. This did not happen. The Mozambicans talked through-out the movie and they laughed when the brave characters in their grey clothes ate yet another pious dinner under compact silence. It was considered very funny and some of them actually whistled. didn't understand anything. What is so bizarre about some good old boring bourgeois respectability? It is not any more bizarre than a Mexican explanation to broken hearts. Too bad black holes had not yet been invented; if they had been, Tita would have known that one of them had landed in her heart and that a cold wind was blowing right through it.
Barbara Vaars

Orig. titel
Como agua para chocolate: Medverkande
Lumi Cavazos, Marco Leonardi: Producent
Alfonso Arau: Manus
Laura Esquivel: Foto
Emanuel Lubeski: Talat språk
Spanish