Review Grade: A
An occasional screenwriter and a one-book-only novelist, 42-year-old
Laura Esquivel is one of
Mexico's most popular writers. Beyond all expectations, Like
Water for Chocolate, a best seller
published there in 1989, has sold close to a million copies in
Spain and in the vast Hispanic America
and has been translated into numerous languages, including English.
(The U.S. edition was brought
out last fall by Doubleday, translated by Carol and Thomas Christensen.)
Set on a ranch on the
U.S.-Mexican border, not far from Piedras Negras and San Antonio,
this romance with highbrow
overtones explores the Rio Grande as an abyss where Anglo and
Hispanic cultures collide, a no
man's land of hybrid idiosyncrasy. Plotted from the late nineteenth
century to a climax during the
rebellious years of the socialist revolution of Emiliano Zapata,
the book has a crystalline feminine
flavor: Recipes of Mexican delicacies like quail in rose-petal
sauce, northern-style chorizo and
beans with chile Tezcucana-style are offered at the beginning
of each of the twelve chapters, with
home remedies for ailments also intertwined. And the intellectual
and spiritual weight of Esquivel's
six protagonists--Tita, Mama Elena, Nacha, Rosaura, Gertrudis
and Chencha--authoritarian
well-to-do matrons, opinionated young girls, soldaderas and maids,
serves to map the trajectory of
feminist history in Mexican society; machismo is the book's hidden
object of ridicule.
Part of Like Water for Chocolate was written in New York, where
the author lived with her
husband, Alfonso Arau, a Mexican actor who has worked in Hollywood
(he appeared in Sam
Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch and Alejandro Jodorowsky's cult film
El Topo, as well as in
Romancing the Stone). Arau is also the experimental director
responsible for south-of-the-border
hits like Mojado Power, a satire of the Chicano movement of the
late 1960s; Calzonzin Inspector,
based on a comic-strip character; and The Barefoot Eagle, about
an unlikely Mexican superhero.
Given the novel's remarkable commercial success (there were more
than 202,000 copies in print in
the U.S. at last count), Esquivel and Arau joined forces in adapting
it for film (she is given the
credit for the screenplay, he produced and directed). The result
is not only of high quality but
ought to be seen in larger scope as the return of Mexican cinema
to the international market of film
festivals and first-run art houses.
During the 1940s and beyond, the so-called Golden Age personified
by Emilio (El Indio)
Fernandez, Gabriel Figueroa and Fernando de Fuentes, Mexican
films received worldwide applause
and were incredibly influential. Maria Candelaria and Los Olvidados
were awarded top prizes at
Cannes and elsewhere, and Pedro Infante, Maria Felix, Jorge Negrete
and Mario Moreno, the
Hispanic Charlie Chaplin known as Cantinflas (who died just a
few weeks ago), were ubiquitous in
the Caribbean, Spain and Central and South America. It was the
age of the Good Neighbor Policy,
and this filmic notoriety sustained itself for a couple of decades,
only to evaporate. A deteriorated
film industry reached its nadir during the scandal-plagued presidential
regime of Jose Lopez
Portillo, when it was deprived of any significant government
financial support; it was finally
declared dead in March 1982, with the explosion and subsequent
demolition of the Cineteca
Nacional, Mexico City's legendary film archive and museum on
Tlalpan Avenue.
The slow and painful agony coincided with the wide impact of Hollywood
comedies and
blockbusters that descended over the nation's theaters, a phenomenon
that managed to fully alienate
the audience from its own country's film resources. In the 1970s,
almost the only productions made
in Mexico were grade-B movies about prostitutes, drugs and violence,
with sex symbols Isela Vega,
Sasha Montenegro, Jorge Rivero and Valentin Trujillo in titles
like The Hustlers and Rape.
(Frequently these were destined for an 18-to-24-year-old male
audience living in East L.A.;
innocent of artistic pretensions, they are a banquet for scholars
interested in popular culture.
Although less than mediocre in quality, they mirror the collective
psyche: Women are
untrustworthy whores and deserting wives, while men always need
to display their overweening
force and courage.) The industry also found itself competing
against soap operas produced by the
private television network, Televisa, owned by the tycoon Emilio
Azcarraga, which represent a
favorite middle-class pastime. Until very recently hopes of recovery
seemed slim.
But miracles occur. Critics today are talking with due optimism
about a renaissance of Mexican
film. Not only have we witnessed the emergence of a handful of
extraordinary young directors like
Maria Novaro, Guadalupe del Toro and Dana Rotberg but also the
resurrection of veterans like
Gabriel Retes, Jaime Humberto Hermosillo and Arturo Ripstein.
Examples include Danzon, Maria
Novaro's second feature, an impressive 1990 lyrical narrative
with actress Maria Rojo in the
leading role, and Red Sunrise, also with Rojo (who, by the way,
manages to be part of the cast in
virtually every important renaissance film). Danzon is about
a lower-class telephone company
worker and dance aficionado who, after the loss of her partner,
travels to Veracruz to find him in
what becomes a voyage to unravel her own feminine identity. The
film has won international
acclaim and was released in the United States last year. Red
Sunrise exhibits a clear Eastern
European style and is about the 1968 Tlatelolco Square student
massacre, as seen from the interior
of an apartment building. Besides these titles, dozens of others
with screenplays by respected
Mexican writers are booked in Mexico's theaters, where a new
audience eagerly awaits them; they
frequently win distribution overseas as well.
The recipient of ten Ariel Awards of the Mexican Academy of Cinematographic
Arts and Sciences,
as well as a number of prizes in the Chicago, Tokyo and Toronto
film festivals, Like Water for
Chocolate (the expression is used in Mexico to describe a state
of sexual arousal), in its unraveling
of the novel's convoluted sentimentality, is at the forefront
of this renaissance. Most of the action
takes place in the ranch kitchen, where Tita, the 24-year-old
strong-willed third daughter of Mama
Elena, condemned to a life of impossible love, enjoys cooking
delicacies for her family and friends,
the town's priests and any passerby. Traces of magic realism,
a style usually attached to Latin
American literature but unquestionably present in Brazil's cinema
novo and in the art of the
Argentine director Eliseo Subiela and other auteurs from the
region, is everywhere: When Tita is
ready to take revenge against her mother, a sister and a boyfriend,
she prepares a powerful mole
that upsets everybody's stomach; when she is sad, her dishes
make people cry; and if she is
passionately in love, her sensual recipes ignite lust in her
many guests. Unpretentious and honest,
the film is Mexico's response to Babette's Feast--a display of
food as the cook's weapon and an
investigation of what Italo Calvino, in Under the Jaguar Sun,
called "the Mexican way of taste."
Acting may have been one of the handicaps of Mexican cinema during
the 1970s, but the surprising
performances of Lumi Cavazos (Tita) and Regina Torne (Mama Elena)
in Like Water for
Chocolate are neither parochial nor underdeveloped; they are
tours de force that leave the viewer
hungry for more. The set design by Emilio and Ricardo Mendoza
and Gonzalo Ceja authentically
reproduces the style of the U.S.-Mexican border at the turn of
the century and is extraordinary
when compared with the numerous disasters made since Ripstein's
The Holy Office. As a director,
Arau uses (at times abuses) close-ups to give a sense of intimacy
and domestic pathos.
To be sure, his film is no masterpiece. The soundtrack is miserable,
and the fact that it used
non-Spanish-speaking actors like Marco Leonardi (Cinema Paradiso),
who needed to be dubbed,
has embarrassing consequences. Still, Like Water for Chocolate
is infinitely better than the average
product that emerged from Mexico after the Golden Age faded.
(Lincoln Center's Walter Reade
Theater and the organizers of the Festival Latino in New York,
by the way, have announced a
retrospective of new trends in Mexican cinema, scheduled for
July 30-August 10.)
And yet, good news in Mexico is often transitory. This welcomed
renaissance is a result, in part, of
efforts by the Instituto Mexicano de Cinematografia (IMCINE),
headed by Ignacio Duran Loera.
The government agency devoted to promoting and developing original
screenplays, to funding
co-productions and orchestrating the general state of affairs,
it has been operating on the premise
that film is not necessarily a money-making industry but is an
essential element in the country's
culture. Since its resurrection in 1988, when Carlos Salinas
de Gortari began his six-year
presidential regime, IMCINE has been offering incentives to attract
investors and has opened doors
that coordinate the technical and creative processes. Although
soap operas still invade most Mexican
living rooms every weekday, a genuine enthusiasm toward Mexican
films is felt across the social
spectrum. But a presidential election is scheduled for next year,
and the candidates' philosophies
could well determine whether Mexican cinema continues its ascent
or begins another period of
decline. Meanwhile, Like Water for Chocolate provides an expression
of a new Mexico, one
enchanted with the drama and lyricism of its daily images, ready
to seize the moment to use movies
as a tool to explore the collective self.