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Sometimes It's Easier Not To Ask Questions

I have a lot of mixed feelings about the movie Like Water For Chocolate. The magical-realism is something that I’m not used to seeing in american movies. It’s strange to see a movie where there is clearly some sort of magic, but that magic isn’t the main focus of the story. The story is about Tita and her tragic love for her sister’s husband, Pedro. The magical realism is just one of the tools used to tell that story.
The movie starts right away with Tita being born accompanied by a biologically impossible rush of water, apparently her tears from inside the womb. This is not remarked as an incredible result of magic by any of the characters, and even the narrator only remarks on it as a testament to Tita’s sensitivity to onions. That sets up our expectations for the rest of the movie. It says to the audience, “A bunch of weird stuff is going to happen, just don’t question it.”

Dr. McNichols briefly mentioned how magical-realism is much more common in international films than in American films. So maybe my main impression from the movie being “Well that was weird” wouldn’t be as big a deal to the original Mexican audience. While the idea of a romance story taking place in the real world being accompanied by unexplained magical phenomenon creates some cognitive dissonance in my mind, this confusion may not be present in an audience more familiar with the concept.
Of course, the magical-realism wasn’t the only part of the film that I found difficult to comprehend. The actions of the characters in the story seemed so bizzare. The cruel mother archetype was perfectly understandable, as well as the idea of a daughter stuck under the control of a parental figure. Those archetypes appear in disney movies at this point, so I had no problem with that. What bothered me was the character of Pedro. A man who falls in love with Tita after barely talking to her it seems, then deciding that MARRYING HER SISTER was the next best option if he couldn’t ever marry Tita, then being neglectful and rejecting his wife, who likely had very little choice in the matter of marriage herself, then having the nerve to get angry at Tita for marrying someone else when he had MARRIED HER SISTER and was clearly never going to be available for her. This is the man that our main character is in love with. Are we supposed to like him? Because I certainly don’t.
Meanwhile the character of John Brown is the one Tita rejects. He cares for her, talks to her, and probably has more lines of dialogue with her than Pedro ever does, before asking for her hand in marriage. Tita accepts, and when she confesses to John that she cheated on him with Pedro, he FORGIVES her. Despite the “taboo” of her not being a virgin before marriage, John tells her that he still loves her and wants to marry her. He even tells her that if she loves Pedro more than she loves him, he will accept defeat gracefully and wish her and Pedro the best of luck. How could she not choose this guy?
My friend Ross has explained to me that Pedro has a very “latino” personality, while John does not, and that’s why I prefer John over Pedro. I don’t know enough about latin culture to know how true this is, but it still feels hard for me to understand the choices Tita makes, regardless of culture.

There was a lot of great food and cooking in the movie, with very literal representations of the more representative idea of food being an expression of emotions, but it’s hard to focus on any of that with the soap opera levels of drama happening along the way. If that’s just because of my American perspective on the situation, so be it.


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