Como Agua Para Chocolate (Like Water for Chocolate)
(Miramax, 1992, 123 Minutes)

Review by Tod Sloan, University of Tulsa

Film Relevance and Connection to the Text
The film is a powerful statement about the power of tradition, the intensity of the romantic impulse, and the individual struggle for selfhood. Check out the novel by the same title by Laura Esquivel. The movie can be linked to Chapters 3 (The Self in Culture), Chapter 7 (Conformity and Obedience), and Chapter 8 (Liking and Loving).

Summary/Synopsis
Tita de la Garza and Pedro Musquiz , two youthful inhabitants of Piedras Negras, a small town in Mexico, fall in love and wish to be married. Tita's mother refuses to let Tita marry because, according to family tradition, the youngest daughter must be on hand to take care of her mother in her old age. Pedro decides to marry Tita's older sister, Rosaura, in order to at least be near Tita. The family then experiences a sequence of magical and tragic events that reveal the power of love and the cruelty of tradition. Tita's unrequited love finds expression in her cooking, which makes her dinner guests feel whatever she has been feeling. A third sister Gertrudis is carried off by revolutionaries. Suppressed passion literally sets fire to things at several points in the film. Tita's mother turns out to have secrets of her own which partly explain her cruelty but also make one wonder why she could not empathize more with her daughter's situation.

Discussion Questions
  1. How does tradition come to have the hold that it does? Why does Tita accept her mother's rule when it runs so intensely counter to her own desires?

  2. What is the role of culture in creating the power of tradition?

  3. What eventually enables Tita to assert herself? What sorts of situations and conditions foster autonomy in life choices?

  4. What examples does the film provide of gender roles and their effects on the quality of life?

  5. What social psychological concepts help us to explain the emotional states that carry away the large groups in this film (assuming that it is not Tita's cooking that does so)?

  6. What do Tita's encounters with the ghost of her mother tell us social relations in which authority, identity, and self-concept are interwoven?

  7. What aspects of the film is social psychology at a loss to explain?

Student Assignment Suggestions
  1. Interview an individual from a previous generation about his or her struggle to break with the authority of a parent or a strong tradition.

  2. Write an autobiographical essay explaining how some part of your identity were formed out of a struggle with tradition or cultural forces.

  3. Romantic love is treated ubiquitously in films and novels. If you were to write a film script or a novel treating the subject of love, what point would you want to make? What aspects of the social psychology of loving would you draw on?

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