照旧，三年前的文字。已经不能全权代表我对电影的理解和对爱情、生活的理解了，但放在这里，以回顾一下从前自己的视角，也是有意义的。
Como agua para chocolate (Like Water for Chocolate) is a novel written by Laura Esquivel. Published in 1989, it was a long-running best seller in Mexico. (Shaw 37) It remained over a year on the best-seller list of the New York Times and was translated into twenty-nine languages. (Shaw 37) In 1991, Mexican film director Alfonso Arau, also Laura’s husband, decided to adpat the best-seller a film. Then Como agua para chocolate turned out to be the most commercially successful Mexican film of the 1990s. (Shaw 37) However, the high gross of the film did not give a true impression of the state of the Mexican film industry. (Shaw 38) In 1990s, low-quality genre films relying on sex and violence prevailed the national film market in Mexico. (Shaw 38)
The film does not reflect a true picture of Mexico either. Following the government’s model of public and private investment, involving Aviasco (a Mexican airline) and the Ministry for Tourism, the film “promotes a conservative, romantic image of rural Mexico that would please the Ministry of Tourism and that belied the reality of mass poverty and ever increasing urbanization.” (Shaw 39) “It is represented as a rural land, which has maintained its culinary and social traditions.” (Shaw 51) The director has commented “the government is very grateful because the film did a great job in promoting tourism and the image of Mexico”. (Shaw 39)
From Novel to Film
Como agua para chocolate tells the story around the Garza family during the Mexican Revolution (1910-1917). (Lopez-Rodriguez 62) In the ranch ruled by the family, Mama Elena makes decisions for her three daughters—Gertrudis, Rosaura, and Tita—regardless of their own desires. (Lopez-Rodriguez 62) Both the novel and the film begin with Esperanza’s (Tita’s niece) careful reading of an inherited cookbook from Tita, and it brings back the memory of the Garzas. Tita is born on the dinner table in the kitchen in 1910. She is brought up by the family servant Nacha in the kitchen, where she learns her talent in cooking. As the youngest daughter of the family, Tita is destined to care for Mama Elena till the last second and is prohibited to marriage. However, in a family dinner, young Tita met a young man, Pedro Muzquiz. They soon fell in love with each other and claimed each other as the only love in the life. Pedro proposes to the Garzas, but Mama Elena turns it down. Instead, Pedro marries Tita’s sister Rosaura in order to be near to Tita. While Mama Elena keeps tormenting Tita, Tita confines herself in the kitchen, making all the delicious and creative dishes for the family. Magically, her emotion is blended into every dish she makes and has the ability to influence everyone who tastes the food she makes.
In Esquivel’s novel, the story is presented as a cookbook, sequenced with twelve months, with a recipe for each month. The twelve recipes each conclude a chapter, carrying special historical and ethnic implications within the ingredients and the procedures. Although the loving way the camera focuses on food makes clear to the film audience that food is a central character in this story”, the film shifts away from the original structure of the novel and brings the storyline without recipes as separation. (Lopez-Rodriguez 63) Many detailed dishes mentioned in the novel is only given a glimpse in the film, or even omitted, while the other ones are described carefully with the camera language. For instance, the February recipe of capones (capons) and the April recipe of mole de guajolote con almendra y ajonjoli (turkey in almond and sesame sauce) are both cut from the plot, and caldo de colita de res (oxtail soup) and tortas de Navidad (Christmas rolls) are only provided with the simplest description. The several recipes Alfonso Arau focuses on are pastel Chabela de bodas (Chabela wedding cake), codornices en petalos de rosa (quail in rose-petal sauce) and chiles en nogada (chili peppers in walnut sauce). Coincidently, two of these three dishes are specially made for the two weddings in the film, and each brings out a different effect. The emphasis of food in the film and the implications of the recipes will be explored later in the essay.
The rest of the story continues in a traditional way. Rosaura soon delivers a baby, and Tita uses her virgin breast milk to feed her. After finding out the vaguely unbroken relationship between Tita and Pedro, Mama Elena sends Pedro and Rosaura away, as well as the baby. Away from Tita, the baby dies, and the reason is believed to be the food. Tita goes insane and hides herself in the dovecote until John Brown, the ranch doctor, picks her up to his house. John takes care of Tita and helps Tita to reconstruct the confidence to face life. Determined to start a new life, Tita accepts John’s proposal. The moment Tita and Pedro reunite on the ranch, both of them know that their passion for each other does not go away. The day John leaves the ranch they have an affair. As a husband, John is always so understanding and tolerant. He forgives the adultery. At the end of the film, John drives car away for business. Pedro takes Tita to the barn house. In the house, the ghost of Nacha appears and lights every candle in the house. In the soft yellow light, Pedro and Tita’s love “finally blossom”. (Hart 172) Metaphorically indicated by the narrator, “all the matches inside Pedro’s body light at the same time”, and the brightness brings him to the eternal of peace. Tita begins to swallow matches, with the memory involving Pedro and her flashing back. She catches fire from the inside meets Pedro in the tunnel to eternity of love.
As the script written by the author of the novel, the film is able to retain the original flavors. The story is kept as original, and with the help of visual language, the film can do what the words cannot do. It puts imagination into reality on screen as well as transforming the story into a sumptuous Mexican feast.
Food in Como agua para chocolate
As “an important topic in the field of cultural materialism”, food is able to “bring to the forefront those elements of life that were traditionally overlooked because they belonged to the domestic sphere and not to the public, broader, male sphere.” (Lopez-Rodriguez 66) Many directors apply food as a medium to convey the meanings. In Ang Lee’s Eat Drink Man Woman, food is a mirror to Chinese culture and ideology. In Lasse Hallström’s Chocolat, food is a gifted creation of magic potion to cure the lagging and obstinacy of the town residents. In Sandra Nettleback’s Bella Martha, food gives a place for communication and enables people to know each other.
In Como agua para chocolate, Alfonso Arau puts tons of emphasis on food. Food plays the central role artistically and commercially. Preparation for food is provided close-up features in the film. The scenes are treated with tenderness and sequential details. Lighting, music and narratives accompanies to strengthen the emotions implicated by the scenes. More than visual enjoyment, the recipes also connect the characters and the storyline. Conclusively, the use of food generally serves functions in four dimensions: as a tag of identity, a language of communication, an expression of creativity and freedom, and an eye into Mexican society in revolutionary and contemporary period. It also offers a space for the story to turn into a magic realistic fairytale.
Language of Expression
Food is a metaphor for emotion throughout the film. Gifted as a very sensual woman, Tita is “repeatedly portrayed tasting, seeing, smelling, touching, and hearing. It is only logical that she communicates through an activity that comprises all the senses.” (Lopez-Rodriguez 68) At the time when Tita and Pedro firstly fell in love, Tita described “Pedro’s gaze on her shoulders” as “what raw dough must feel when it comes in contact with hot oil”. “Bubbles break out of her body”. The medium of food solidifies abstract feelings in Tita’s world, and Tita is able to resort to expressing her feelings through the creation of delicacy in the limited area of kitchen. In the kitchen, food is translated into a new language. In the film, Tita’s recipes are always related to whatever is happening to her at the time. One of the scenes is that in which Tita prepares the quails in rose petal sauce. Right after “Pedro has given her the roses to congratulate her on her excellent culinary skills on the anniversary of her first year as the house cook, and she uses them in defiance of her mother in this dish.” The cooking process is split in sequential details—peeling of rose petals, bundling the quails, grinding rose petal sauces, and adding a drop of mysterious seasoning—representing as an expression of her love for Pedro. “This scene is accompanied by lush piano music that highlights the connection between romance and the culinary process.” (Shaw 51) Here, “cooking is Tita’s way of telling him what she cannot vocalize.” (Lopez-Rodriguez 69)
Realizing the possible communication between Pedro and her through food, Tita feels “compelled to create more and more recipes that will keep alive the love” that Mama Elena and Rosaura had tried to prohibit. (Lopez-Rodriguez 69) “It is this need to create or re-create delicious dishes that moves Tita to put in writing all the recipes she has received from Nacha; that is how their cookbook is born.” (Lopez-Rodriguez 69)
Territory of Freedom and Creativity
We can understand that the kitchen offers Tita an area of “unrestricted freedom” to escape from Mama Elena’s tyranny. (Shaw 50) In the kitchen, Tita is given a free voice to express herself, a territoriality for creativity. (Lopez-Rodriguez 67) Mama Elena tries to control everything of Tita, restricting her from marriage according to the old convention that the youngest daughter should care for mother till death. But her power is limited outside the kitchen. Due to the lack of culinary experience, she never tells Tita what to cook and how to cook, so cooking provides “an outlet for the creativity Mama Elena is always restraining.” (Lopez-Rodriguez 68) So here Tita finds “a means of self-definition and survival”. (Lopez-Rodriguez 66)
“The liberation through food and cooking is not limited to Tita alone, but also occurs for the people who eat her meals.” (Lopez-Rodriguez 68) In Tita’s territory, her emotions evoked by personal experience are also transferred to others through food. “She feels and she makes others feel.” (Lopez-Rodriguez 69) When blending the flour and eggs for making Rosaura and Pedro’s wedding cake, Tita unintentionally drops a tear into the ingredient. It turns out that during the wedding reception, whoever has a bite of the cake, is reminded of the sorrow of lost love. In an old Spanish love ballad, a sense of melancholy and frustration from “love of their lives” spreads through every guest and the scene culminates in a collective of vomiting. “Uncontrollable outbursts of pleasure, sadness”, which is usually forbidden in the ranch, is let free with the help of Tita’s food. (Lopez-Rodriguez 68)
Kitchen as An Eye
Esquivel has pointed out in an interview: “the kitchen, to me, is the most important part of the house. It is a source of knowledge that generates life and pleasure.” (Hart 173) Como agua para chocolate offers a “feminine kitchen-eye’s view of those turbulent years during Mexican Revolution (1910-1917), which is “at odds with the masculinity rhetoric of the history books with their emphasis on battles and the struggle for civic power.” (Hart 173) “The film, in its content, including modernization, the increase of social inequality, and the growth of feminism. This can be seen in the way that it ignores all of these issues and reinvents the past in such a way as to negate social history. The image of Mexico sold to national and international audiences through the film are filled with nostalgia for a mythical past. In this reinterpretation of the past, gender roles are clearly delineated, class and ethnic tensions are ignored, and nobody goes hungry.” (Shaw 39)
The cookbook received by Esperanza is an essential clue in the film. It connects different races and cultures in the film and “symbolizes not only the loving relationship among women but also the preservation of Nahuatl heritage and its mixture with Spanish and Ceole elements”. (Lopez-Rodriguez 70)
“Nacha and Chencha, members of ethnic minorities, have been denied by the dominant white upper class the possibility of expressing their knowledge through any medium other than the recipes they cherish. By passing the recipes on to the next generation they are not only able to communicate some practical information but to preserve elements of an indigenous culture that would otherwise be lost.” (Lopez-Rodriguez 69)
Construction of Fairytale
Labeled as magical realism, Como agua para chocolate is consisted of numerous fantastic scenes beyond reality and a bunch of fairytale traditions. The main roles in the film have their counterparts, which can be found in traditional fairytales. The romantic heroine Tita is like Cinderella, arduous and kind, while at the meantime suffering the inequality caused by a wicked mother, Mama Elena. Tita is so talented as a maternal role model that she even knows how to deliver the baby. “Bound to the kitchen from the moment of her emblematic birth in this very same room, Tita is treated first by her mother and later by Rosaura as just another servant.” (Lopez-Rodriguez 67) The setting even parallels with the story of Cinderella. John Brown, the fiancé of Tita, is the benevolent, careful and tolerant doctor that can be found in many 18th century fairytales as a positive figure without imperfection. In Como agua para chocolate, his tendance heals Tita’s sorrow for love and his great breath of mind forgives the adultery between Tita and Pedro. Nacha and Chencha are the servants who are satisfied with the status of being ruled and have a loving relationship.
Moreover, besides the setting of the roles, the strange alchemical reaction brought by food and the abrupt passion of people all tell the story in the language of fairytale.
Reference:
Ching, Eric, Christina Buckley, and Angelica Lozano-Alonso. Reframing Latin America. Austin: University of Texas P, 2007. 286-305.
Como Agua Para Chocolate. Dir. Alfonso Arau. Perf. Marco Leonardi, Lumi Cavazos. Videocassette. Buena Vista Home Video, 1992.
Esquivel, Laura. Como agua para chocolate: novela de entregas mensuales con recetas, amores y remedios caseros. México, D.F.: Editorial Planeta Mexicana, 1989.
Esquivel, Laura. Like Water for Chocolate: a Novel in Monthly Installments, with Recipes, Romances, and Home Remedies. Trans. Carol Christensen and Thomas Christensen. 1st ed. New York: Doubleday, 1992.
Halevi-Wise, Yael. "Storytelling in Laura Esquivel's Como agua para chocolate." The Other Mirror: Women's Narrative in Mexico, 1980-1995. Ed. Kristine Ibsen. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood P, 1997. 123-130.
Hart, Stephen M. A Companion to Latin American Film. Woodbridge: Tamesis, 2004. 171-178.
Lopez-Rodriguez, Miriam. "Cooking Mexicanness: Shaping National Identity in Alfonso Araus Como agua para chocolate." Reel Food. Ed. Anne L. Bower. New York: Routledge, 2004. 61-73.
Segovia, Miguel A. "Only Cauldrons Know the Secrets of Their Soups." Velvet Barrios: Popular Culture& Chicana/O Sexualities. Ed. Alicia G. Alba. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. 163-178.
Shaw, Deborah. Contemporary Cinema of Latin America: Ten Key Films. New York: Continuum, 2003. 36-51.
April 6, 2008
