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Like Water for Chocolate Movie Review

Like Water for Chocolate is a 1992 Mexican romantic drama film directed by Alfonso Arau and starring Marco Leonardi, Lumi Cavazos and Regina Torne. It’s a very well made, but uninteresting picture.

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“I’m a man of few, but firm, words“

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When tradition prevents her from marrying the man she loves, a young woman discovers she has a unique talent for cooking. This is one of those movies that simply wasn’t made for me. It’s a romance intended to appeal to female audiences first and foremost and to those who are fans of soapy dramas. I am a fan of neither, so this was a tough watch for me, though I surely appreciated its cinematic qualities.

This is a magical realist story and I like this narrative style when it is done sparingly, but here it is so often used that it made the movie silly. For instance, there is this famous sequence where a woman becomes so horny that she leaves a fiery trail on the house. This type of on-the-nose symbolism plagues most of this film. It simply lacked nuance and subtlety in its approach.

That is not to say that the characters are badly developed. All of these women are different from each other and they all exemplify a unique type of femininity and female role model. It’s a feminist movie and this level of complexity in the characterization is its biggest strength. However, I still did not care for these characters as there are too many of them, again reminding me of a book instead of a movie. And sure enough it is based on a novel, which can easily be deduced.

Like Water for Chocolate has very forgettable male characters as the women are the focus here. Most of the plot points were either ridiculous or very difficult to believe, and that was my biggest problem. I could never overcome the soapiness and the silliness of this plot. The cinematography, score and directing are all very strong, but just the story itself was both uninteresting and annoying to me. I can see it appealing to women, but not that many men unfortunately or those who aren’t romance genre fans.

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