Word: tita
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Described somewhat unimaginatively on the back of the video-casette box as "an erotic tale of forbidden love" (jackpot!), this lush film got much praise when it debuted a few years ago. Poor Tita and Pedro--so in love, but kept apart by a cruel tradition which stipulates that Tita must remain single and serve her family. A solution seems to present itself when Pedro marries her older sister and Tita serves as their cook--the sexual tension is thicker than flan and a lot hotter...
...Tita (Lumi Cavazos), the heroine of Like Water for Chocolate, is one such kitchen magician. It is said that she cried even in her mother's womb and that the salt from her tears at birth filled a 40-lb. sack that spiced the family meals for years. She has so much love to give -- especially to Pedro (Marco Leonardi), a handsome rancher -- but upper-class convention would strangle it. Her tyrannical mother Elena (Regina Torne) decreed that as her youngest daughter, Tita must care for her and never marry...
Denied her life's love and condemned to the serving life, Tita finds in cooking the steam of sorcery. When Pedro marries her sister Rosaura (Yareli Arizmendi) simply to be near Tita, she bakes a wedding cake that leaves the celebrators sick or spellbound. When Pedro dares to give her a bouquet of roses, she presses them ecstatically to her chest -- the scratches are as close as she can get to Pedro's caresses -- and then prepares a heady quail with rose-petal sauce. Her culinary witchcraft will affect many births, marriages and deaths. But they will not stanch...
There is a plethora of primal romance in Like Water for Chocolate, set mostly in Mexico's turbulent 1910s. While the eldest sister (mesmerized, of course, by Tita's food) runs off naked to join Zapata's forces of independence, Tita stays at home to mix her own sweet subversion into her food. As the movie proves, the most profound revolutions are the oldest -- the ones women have been cooking up since the cave days...
...directed with expansive tenderness, Like Water for Chocolate is a story of passion in bondage and death in a fire storm of desire too long withheld. Viewers need not feel so constrained; they can enjoy the emotional splendor, gasp at the ghosts, cry with as much good cause as Tita. By comparison with this banquet of feelings, most other movies are trail...