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, papers and her birth certificate to make it official, she also told her two daughters to not have any contact with her. Gertrudis comes back later in the film to show another comical part, she’s now a general for the revolutionaries. She orders one of the soldiers around, like a man, but yet she is a woman. This is putting another woman’s role into a different hand, because I’ve never heard of any women being generals or anywhere high in the ranks.
None of her soldiers are female, she is the only one within the group, yet she is the general, if the mother only knew!The mother dies in the film because of her stubborness. She doesn’t like the fact that Tita and Pedro may be doing something they shouldn’t since she is married to Rosura so she has them move away. During this time, the priest tells her that it isn’t a wise idea to not have a man around, but mother, Elena, believes that she can take care of herself and her ranch just fine because she has done it for so long already. She ends up dead, because she didn’t take his advice because she feels she is strong enough, but she gets a group of guerrillas who rape and kill on the ranch.
If this woman had only listened to a man, and let alone a priest. In conclusion, this film was very confusing and I’m not sure if its an accurate account of the actions of women during the Mexican Revolution. I believe that there are many traditions like the one seen about marriage in Mexico, but I think that men had more of a role then what the film portrayed. Bibliography:
