Like Water for Chocolate

Overtly passionate, ebulliently funny and ideologically subtle, Like Water for Chocolate is strong drink - hot and sweet. It toasts life not as it is but as it should be. [09 Apr 1993]

Like Water for Chocolate creates its own intense world of passion and romance, and adds a little comedy and a lot of quail, garlic, honey, chiles, mole, cilantro, rose petals and corn meal.

Food and passion create a sublime alchemy in Like Water for Chocolate, a Mexican film whose characters experience life so intensely that they sometimes literally smolder.

The simplicity of Like Water for Chocolate - a Mexican expression for the boiling point - is that of a sophisticated hand paring away all excess until what's left is primal, elemental. In Esquivel's and Arau's fabulist hands, it's the hand that tends the cookfire that rules the world. [19 Mar 1993, p.50]

An enchanting story played out by a great female cast, particularly Cavazos as the poor Tita, and unique visuals from Arau. With equal parts melodrama, comedy, tragedy and cookery, Like Water For Chocolate adapts well from script to screen, unlike most Hollywood attempts.

Though one wonders if Arau couldn't have found more visual parallels for Esquivel's narrative, overall the film is a witty, charming diversion that struck a chord with audiences.

In the end, Like Water for Chocolate is an overwrought potboiler that punishes Tita for her sexual freedom.