Like Water For Chocolate

The film, Like Water for Chocolate, represents a story through incorporating the idea of food as feelings and expressing the woman's roles during the Mexican Revolution. The film is a romantic-comedy showing many joking ways of hard times and soft issues and the way of life. The most striking and theme seems to be how women seem to be in charge rather then males; during this time period, I thought that men were more likely to be the head of the household and in charge.

Throughout the film, the main overall theme is that a woman had an illegitimate daughter with someone while she was married, her husband left her, and she was alone with three girls and the youngest, Tita, was to never marry because she was to take care of her mother until the day she died. As Tita grew her and a boy, Pedro, fell in love, but her mother would not allow her to marry, and instead, he married her sister, Rosura, to be close to her. Pedro and Rosura had their last child and Rosura vowed she would not be able to marry because she too, like Tita, would have to take care of her until the day she died. Tita very much hated this idea, as she hated how her mother controlled her and forbade her to not marry her only love, as seen at the end when Rosura dies, Pedro and Tita are now able to get married at last. This silly tradition of the youngest girl taking care of her mother shows the power of family traditions and most likely, a Latin American tradition. The mother was in charge of her daughter, she said she was not to marry and she did not. Then the sister wanted to follow through with the same tradition that had made her sister so miserable.

To take light of the film there were many comical parts, that seemed unlikely considering the nature of the film. When Tita cooked, her feelings came through in her food. She felt bad when her sister married, so when she made her cake, everyone became sick. Rosura always had gas from what Tita made to eat and bad breath. Tita received roses from Pedro, she made quail and rose petal soup to show him her love and then everyone who ate it was having almost sexual feelings. It was ridiculous to comprehend because everyone was feeling how she was though her food and no one gets like that in real life.

Tita's sister Gertrudis, ran off with revolutionaries and her mother basically sinned her and made everyone forget of her existence. She burned pictures,