Like Water for Chocolate (1992) Review: Recipes for Longing

Is Like Water for Chocolate worth watching?

Yes. Like Water for Chocolate is a lush, playful and heartfelt romance, and one of the films that introduced international audiences to the pleasures of Mexican magical realism. Alfonso Arau turns cooking into a language of desire, grief and rebellion, and the best sequences are both funny and genuinely sensual. The reservations are its melodrama, which is laid on thickly, and a romantic hero who is far less interesting than the woman who loves him.

What is Like Water for Chocolate about?

On a ranch in northern Mexico in the early years of the 20th century, Tita (Lumi Cavazos) is the youngest daughter of the formidable Mamá Elena (Regina Torné). Family tradition dictates that the youngest daughter must never marry but instead care for her mother until death. When Pedro (Marco Leonardi), the young man Tita loves, asks for her hand, Mamá Elena refuses and offers him Tita’s older sister instead. Pedro accepts, hoping to stay close to Tita. Confined to the kitchen, Tita pours her feelings into her cooking, and her dishes begin to have strange, powerful effects on everyone who eats them.

Like Water for Chocolate is directed by Arau from a screenplay by Laura Esquivel, adapted from her own bestselling novel. It is a Mexican production in Spanish that runs 105 minutes. It won best picture and best director at Mexico’s Ariel Awards and became one of the most successful foreign-language releases of its era in the United States.

Food as feeling

The central conceit is irresistible. Tita cannot speak her heart openly, so her food speaks for her, and Arau stages the results as grand comic and romantic set pieces. A wedding feast becomes a wave of collective sorrow; a dish of quail in rose-petal sauce unleashes an overwhelming passion. These scenes are the film at its most inventive, blending kitchen realism with fairy-tale exaggeration.

The period setting, with the Mexican Revolution raging just beyond the ranch, gives the story a wider backdrop, and the film uses the kitchen as a microcosm of the country’s upheavals: a space of tradition and control that is also, quietly, a site of resistance.

Tita against her mother

Lumi Cavazos gives Tita a quiet radiance and a stubborn inner strength. She conveys much of her emotion through stillness and glances, which makes the moments when her feelings spill out, via food or otherwise, all the more striking. It is a warm, intelligent performance that holds the film together.

Regina Torné’s Mamá Elena is a magnificent monster, a figure of iron discipline whose cruelty is rooted in tradition and her own buried history. The film’s real drama is the battle of wills between mother and daughter, and it is here that it finds its most resonant themes about women’s freedom and inheritance.

Where the romance goes soft

Pedro is the film’s weak link. Marco Leonardi is handsome and earnest, but the character is passive, and his choices make it hard to see why he inspires such devotion. The film’s tone also swings between broad comedy, lyrical romance and heavy melodrama, and not every shift is smooth. The glossy, soft-focus photography, typical of its period, can feel dated beside more restrained modern films.

Who should watch Like Water for Chocolate?

It is ideal for fans of romance, magical realism and literary adaptations, and for anyone who loves films in which food is central to the story. At 105 minutes it is an easy, satisfying watch. It contains sensuality, some sexual content and moments of death and grief, suited to adults and older teenagers.

Further viewing:

• Macario, a classic Mexican fable that also mixes the everyday with the supernatural.
• Roma, Alfonso Cuarón’s intimate portrait of a Mexican household seen through the women who hold it together.

The verdict

Like Water for Chocolate is a sensual, imaginative and emotionally generous film that turns a kitchen into a battlefield of love and tradition. Its melodrama and underwritten hero keep it from perfection, but its magical set pieces, strong central performances and memorable feast of ideas make it a delicious classic.

Rating: 4/5