Kitchen Magician

By RICHARD CORLISS

TITLE: LIKE WATER FOR CHOCOLATE

DIRECTOR: ALFONSO ARAU

WRITER: LAURA ESQUIVEL

THE BOTTOM LINE: This grand Mexican fable shows that the way to a man's heart is through a woman's hearth.

; Nothin' says lovin' like somethin' from the oven. The extra ingredient is care. Just like Mom used to make it.

It's a pity that the folk wisdom of food has degenerated into commercial slogans -- for the kitchen is a place of remembered magic. What are spells, if not womankind's oldest recipes? What is a caldron but a pot for witches' bouillabaisse? Snow White's stepmother was Apple Annie with a grudge, and Macbeth's Weird Sisters were the sous-chefs of Destiny. If a woman's place is at the stove, then it is there she spent millenniums perfecting her potions. She let her power simmer over a low flame; then she served up the concoction, a work of art from the hearth, to charm those who would love her and poison those who would enslave her.

Tita (Lumi Cavazos), the heroine of Like Water for Chocolate, is one such kitchen magician. It is said that she cried even in her mother's womb and that the salt from her tears at birth filled a 40-lb. sack that spiced the family meals for years. She has so much love to give -- especially to Pedro (Marco Leonardi), a handsome rancher -- but upper-class convention would strangle it. Her tyrannical mother Elena (Regina Torne) decreed that as her youngest daughter, Tita must care for her and never marry.

Denied her life's love and condemned to the serving life, Tita finds in cooking the steam of sorcery. When Pedro marries her sister Rosaura (Yareli Arizmendi) simply to be near Tita, she bakes a wedding cake that leaves the celebrators sick or spellbound. When Pedro dares to give her a bouquet of roses, she presses them ecstatically to her chest -- the scratches are as close as she can get to Pedro's caresses -- and then prepares a heady quail with rose-petal sauce. Her culinary witchcraft will affect many births, marriages and deaths. But they will not stanch her tears.

In her first novel, Like Water for Chocolate, Mexican screenwriter Laura Esquivel brought Gabriel Garcia Marquez's brand of magic realism into the kitchen and the bedroom, the Latin woman's traditional castle and dungeon. The film version was written by Esquivel and directed by her husband Alfonso Arau, known to U.S. audiences for his performances in funky-flaky westerns. In The Wild Bunch he played a punk gunslinger and in Three Amigos! the malefic El Guapo, who spits out the immortal line "A plethora of pinatas!"

There is a plethora of primal romance in Like Water for Chocolate, set mostly in Mexico's turbulent 1910s. While the eldest sister (mesmerized, of course, by Tita's food) runs off naked to join Zapata's forces of independence, Tita stays at home to mix her own sweet subversion into her food. As the movie proves, the most profound revolutions are the oldest -- the ones women have been cooking up since the cave days.

Acted with subtle ferocity, directed with expansive tenderness, Like Water for Chocolate is a story of passion in bondage and death in a fire storm of desire too long withheld. Viewers need not feel so constrained; they can enjoy the emotional splendor, gasp at the ghosts, cry with as much good cause as Tita. By comparison with this banquet of feelings, most other movies are trail mix.