Film Thursday: Like Water for Chocolate

Hey Guys,

It is Thursday Film Day.

Here’s the part of the week where I will either review a film or talk about how film can affect us in certain ways. Each week I will ask you what you feel should review next or what area of film I should look into.

This week I had a request to talk over how certain objects or scenes in films convey a different meaning than what they first represent and how things aren’t always as they first seem.

I’ve been told to watch the film Like Water for Chocolate (1992) a Spanish film, Directed by Alfonso Arau. Now apparently to Tonya, the friend who recommended this to me, it has a lot of symbolism and representation about food and cooking with-in the story.

First I will give a short Synopsis of what the story is about, followed by what symbolism means to me and how to understand why actions may represent something completely different. It is all about Semiotics.

The story is about life in Mexico and how it used to be. This is a story of love and passion between two people, Pedro and Tita; who could not marry due to Tita’s mother, who wanted her eldest daughter to marry and have Tita stay and care for her. The story shows how marriage used to be imposed in the times and how love between two people can change the views of others, which eventually changes everything.

I will try not to put any spoilers in, so if you do wish to watch this film and see what I’m chatting about and help you understand you can.

This film starts by the old myth of onions and how they make you cry. It speaks of how to stop yourself from crying. ‘Once you have started crying it is difficult to stop.’

This film shows that food is a natural part of life and growing up. It explains that different things tickle our taste buds and that love is just like eating chocolate.

The narrative explains how Tita is feeling and always refers to her feelings as if they are like food items. The way Pedro looks at her burns like oil burns skin, the way it makes her feels like dough melting and rising.

As she has grown up in the kitchen and all she has understood is how food and ingredients react when they are blended together this explains why she expresses her feelings in this manner.

As in films such as Fight Club when the character, who goes by the name of Jack, explains his feelings of rage and anger as if it was an illness or a wound ‘I am Jack’s raging bile duct.’ This was set out due to the fact that the film is based around violence and him getting injured. It is also about the character’s mental state and how he collapses as a person.

In Like Water for Chocolate it explains that she knits a blanket as she cries, because she is upset. ‘Yet the she could not clear the cold’. This explains how her heart is broken from loss of love and it has grown cold.

The phrase I liked the most from this film was the one the cook/Nana spoke ‘Only the pot knows the boiling point of the broth, but I can easily guess yours’ This basically means that she is telling Tita to stay strong no matter what happens, as what is happening it is not down to her own doing but what her mother has done to her.

When Pedro gives Tita roses as a sign of her love, she uses them in her cooking. She wants to spread the love and make everyone feel full of joy as she has felt from these roses given to her. She says that her whole self had dissolved into the food she had prepared. In other words she had put her whole life and soul, including her love into this dish as the roses made her feel good again.

This continues through the film, explaining more about the food and how it represents the passion and love behind the relationship and how both intertwined together.

Other films that have symbolism in them are such films as American History X, where all of the flashbacks are shown in black and white, while the present day scenes are in colour. This is symbolic of Edward Norton's character's changes, as he becomes reformed and has progressed.

There is also a lot of symbolism in Shindler's List. One I can remember is where the girl in red who represents the struggle that all the Jews went through during the Holocaust.

Over all, the importance of symbolism shows the audience that objects and actions can mean more than what they show at face value. We as an Audience should watch for such things and try to understand what they mean, but we have to be careful because eventually everything can become a semiotic symbol and then what the director actually wanted to be meant may be lost by us looking too deep into things.

If you have any films that you recommend me looking at, or any themes that you feel need going over then please let me know.

Stay safe,

Matt