Summary:
The film is set in rural Mexico near the border with Texas during the Mexican Revolution of 1910–20. It is ostensibly a romance, a tale of love thwarted by rigid tradition. Tita, the youngest daughter of Mama Elena, is prevented from marrying her true love, Pedro, because it is her destiny to care for her mother in her old age. Mama Elena cruelly offers her oldest daughter, Rosaura, as an alternative match for Pedro. Pedro accepts the match, seeing it as an opportunity to be near Tita.
Analysis:
Like Water for Chocolate was the highest grossing Mexican film of the 1990s. In the USA it took over $21 million, more than any other foreign language film in 1993. It was widely seen as heralding a renaissance in the Mexican film industry, which had been in the doldrums since the ‘golden age’ of the 1930s to 1950s. The film, which cost $2 million to make, was funded by a mixture of public and private finance including from IMCINE (Instituto Mexicano de Cinematografia), Aviasco, a Mexican airline, and the Mexican Ministry of Tourism. It is a film which presents the country in a tourist-friendly manner and is packed with images of a romanticised, nostalgic Mexico which in part account for its international success.1
The screenplay is adapted by Laura Esquivel from her best-selling novel Como agua para chocolate. The novel draws on a genre of writing first popularised in Mexico in the 1850s when stories for women were published in monthly instalments intertwined with recipes, dressmaking patterns and household remedies.2 These publications were both entertaining and instructional and were in some senses the forerunners of modern women’s magazines. Esquivel’s book is divided into 12 monthly chapters, each based around a recipe. The narrative is played out through the preparation and consumption of food. The film follows a similar episodic structure and retains some of the instructional elements of the book; the preparation of food is often shown in detail and in close-up. The camera lingers on mundane tasks: the grinding of corn for flour, the cracking of eggs for the wedding cake batter and the cracking of nuts for the wedding banquet. The story develops with the kitchen as its central locus and is woven through the performance of everyday domestic chores.
The film draws on a rich seam of South American magic realism, a genre which imbues ‘ordinary world’ situations with fantastical elements. Tita, the film’s central protagonist is born in the kitchen on a tide of tears. (The salt from these tears fills a large sack and is used in the family’s meals for many years.) She is brought up in the kitchen by Nacha the Indian cook and learns how to prepare traditional Mexican dishes. Her food takes on magical properties. As Nacha and Tita prepare the cake for Rosaura and Pedro’s wedding banquet, Tita’s tears flow into the batter and, when eaten, the cake causes an epidemic of crying and vomiting in the wedding guests. On another occasion, Tita prepares quail in rose-petal sauce, using roses that Pedro has given her. The food becomes an embodiment of her passion for Pedro and has a dramatic effect on her sister Gertrudis who develops an uncontrollable sexual desire, which she cannot quench. The heat of this desire burns down the shower house and Gertrudis, in a frenzy, runs off naked, only to be scooped up by a soldier on horseback.
The title is based on a traditional Mexican saying referring to water that is hot and bubbling like a passion or a temper. The film seethes with sensuality. The food is abundant and luscious. It ignites passion and emotion within those that consume it and we can see its effects on the faces of the diners. The food itself represents a melding of various aspects of Mexican culture, the dishes being by turn simple peasant dishes and lavish celebratory fare with expensive ingredients.
Within the film, Tita is portrayed as an idealised woman. She is talented at all domestic tasks and is beautiful and virtuous. She is the keeper of good traditions that will nourish future generations. By contrast the traditions espoused by Mama Elena are repressive and cruel. The tensions between these two traditions reflect the tensions between middle-class Hispanic values and older preHispanic ways in Mexican society, which were played out in the Mexican Revolution enabling an escape from Spanish colonialism and a rediscovery of Mexican identity. As in the popular melodramas of Mexican cinema, these tensions are played out in a personal domestic setting rather than on the battlefield. In such films, the narratives contained gendered archetypes from Mexican tradition. In this film the gendered nature of these roles is destabilised. Mama Elena is the patriarch of the family. She behaves like the authoritarian father, unmoved by sentiment, disciplined and rigid in her views. Ultimately she is revealed as a hypocrite, when Tita discovers that Gertrudis is the product of her mother’s affair. We are not certain whether the family traditions she cites are real or of her own making and she is selective about which traditions she chooses to honour. For example, she eschews the traditional role of nurturing mother and takes on the male role of ranch owner, but she insists that the tradition of the youngest daughter remaining unmarried to care for her mother in old age is adhered to. It is Nacha who is the traditional nurturing mother figure, a role that is bequeathed to Tita. Tita becomes the source of nourishment for all the family, including Rosaura’s son whom she is able to breastfeed despite being a virgin. Rosaura, the obedient daughter who follows her mother’s wishes, is incapable of nurturing her child or her husband and her failed efforts at cooking are contrasted with Tita’s skill in the kitchen. Rosaura is bereft of passion, joy and imagination. She passively follows the wishes of Mama Elena and lives her life unhappily, plagued by digestive illnesses that eventually kill her. By contrast, Gertrudis, the middle daughter is a free spirit. Some commentators have suggested that her wildness is evidence of racial stereotyping within the film (Gertrudis is mixed race). However she is the character who emerges happy and fulfilled at the end of the film. She is a subversion of a key melodramatic female archetype: the whore.3 Normally a role associated with shame and suffering, to Gertrudis it is a natural outlet for sexual passion. Later in the film she becomes a soldier, rising to the rank of general and having men under her command. Like Mama Elena she takes on a traditional male role and this gender transgression is emphasised when Tita steps out to have a serious chat to Pedro halfway through cooking fritters for Gertrudis. Rather than finish the job herself, Gertrudis employs her sergeant to complete the task.
The male characters in the film are by contrast passive: Pedro goes along with Mama Elena’s rulings without question and never actively fights for Tita; Dr John Brown cares for Tita and restores her to health when she breaks down after the death of Rosaura’s son but passively accepts Tita sleeping with Pedro and is still prepared to marry her despite the indiscretion. However female autonomy within the film is largely achieved by the absence of male society, politics and commerce. We have a glimpse at the male world at the start of the film when Tita’s father has a heart attack in a bar and dies, having discovered that Gertrudis is not his biological daughter, but, throughout the film most of the action takes place in a matriarchal domestic setting. The revolution is used as a backdrop to the narrative rather than being a key feature and although soldiers appear from time to time, we are not told the nature of the conflict. The family themselves carry on life as normal with the fighting going on around them. Mama Elena is killed by soldiers and Chencha, the servant is raped but these events are not part of a wider narrative about the war.
There are parallels between the narrative and the traditional European folk tale of Cinderella. We can map the characters across: Tita consigned to the kitchen is Cinderella; Mama Elena, her nemesis, is the wicked stepmother who victimises Tita and treats her as a personal servant; Rosaura her eldest sister who does her mother’s bidding is the ugly sister; and Nacha who supports Tita is the fairy godmother. Pedro is Prince Charming, but does not emerge as a romantic hero. He passively goes along with the rules as set down by Mama Elena and does not attempt to rescue Tita from a life of drudgery. Tita too is outwardly conformist; her rebellion is enacted through her food. Although she does not consciously control its magical effects, rather the passion just overflows from her into the food. Her cooking expresses what she herself cannot and food forms a communication between her and Pedro allowing her to ‘enter his body’ through the meals that she cooks him.
Tita is only free to be fully with Pedro after her mother and sister are dead. At the end of the film this complete union is both passionate and romantic. The ghost of Nacha lights a myriad of candles around the bed. Pedro and Tita are literally consumed by their passion. Pedro dies during lovemaking and Tita realises that he has ‘lit all his matches’ simultaneously as described by Dr John’s Indian grandmother. She swallows matches to join him and the ranch is consumed in flames. Tita and Pedro walk into a tunnel of light to enjoy their happy-ever-after. This is clearly a parody of a fairy-tale ending, indicating the impossibility of eternal love and happiness. Tita succeeds in passing on a legacy to future generations in the form of her recipes and in the termination of the tradition of enslavement of the youngest daughter; the film is narrated by Tita’s grand-niece as evidence of this legacy.
The message of the film is highly conservative and whereas ‘domestic’ feminists have praised the film for its celebration of the creativity of women and female tradition, others have noted that the film consigns Tita to success only in the private and personal realm. The public sphere of men is hidden from our view and so are the inequalities of wider society. The effect is to present domestic servitude as a natural role for women (and Indian servants), thereby ultimately reinforcing the patriarchal order.4
Janice Kearns
Notes
1. See Deborah Shaw’s chapter, ‘Seducing the public: Images of Mexico in Like Water for Chocolate and Amores Perros’, in Contemporary Cinema of Latin America: Ten key Films, London & New York, Continuum, 2003.
2. See Maria Elena de Valdes (1995) ‘Verbal and visual representation of women: Como agua para chocolate/Like Water for Chocolate’, in World Literature Today, Winter 1995, Vol. 69, Issue 1, University of Oklahoma, p. 78.
3. From ‘La Malinche’, the Aztec princess who delivered her country to Cortez through sexual submission.
4. See Kraniauskas, J. (1993), ‘Como agua para chocolate’, Sight and Sound Vol. 3, No. 10, pp. 42–3, BFI, London.
Cast and Crew:
[Country: Mexico. Production Company: Arau Films. Director and Producer: Alfonso Arau. Screenwriter: Laura Esquivel. Cinematographers: Emmanuel Lubezki and Steve Bernstein. Editors: Carlos Bolado and Francisco Chiu. Music: Leo Brower. Cast: Lumi Cavazos (Tita), Regina Torné (Mama Elena), Marco Leonardi (Pedro Muzquiz), Mario Ivan Martinez (Doctor John Brown), Ada Carrasco (Nacha), Yareli Arizmendi (Rosaura), Claudette Maillé (Gertrudis), Pilar Aranda (Chencha).]
Further Reading:
L. A. Cheyne, ‘Gender, Agency, Memory, and Identity in Like Water for Chocolate’, in Offscreen Volume 7, Issue 4, April 2003. Available at www.horschamp.qc.ca/new_offscreen/water_- chocolate.html (accessed 14 April 2013).
C. Counihan, ‘Food, Feelings and Film: Women’s Power in Like Water for Chocolate’, in Food, Culture and Society: An International Journal of Multidisciplinary Research, Volume 8, Number 2, Fall 2005, pp. 201–14.
J. King, A. M. Lopez and M. Alvarado (eds), Mediating Two Worlds: Cinematic Encounters in the Americas, London, BFI, 1993.
Source Credits:
The Routledge Encyclopedia of Films, Edited by Sarah Barrow, Sabine Haenni and John White, first published in 2015.