Movie Reviews: Eat, Drink, Food, Metaphor (Food on Film)

By Lynn Hamilton

Like Water for Chocolate

Isabelle Allende's magical Like Water for Chocolate was surely not the first novel to propose food as a surrogate for unfulfilled passion. But the Oscar-winning film of the same title gets a lot of credit for introducing food as a metaphor to the mainstream film industry.

Allende's fairly mediocre book (suitable for the gifted middle school curriculum, perhaps) makes a brilliant film, its simple-minded emotions and symbols brought to life and layered with nuance by Director Alfonso Arau.

The story revolves around an arcane Mexican family tradition: the youngest daughter of the family must not marry, because her assigned role is to care for her mother. In Allende's fictional family, the mother heartlessly refuses to waive this custom--even though her youngest daughter (played by Lumi Cavazos) is head over heels in love with the boy next door (Marco Leonardi).

Betrayal leads to betrayal, and Leonardi marries Cavazos' older sister instead. Confined to the kitchen, Cavazos starts striking back, preparing food that imposes the workings of her private heart on everyone who eats it. When Cavazos is happy, her dishes make everyone horny. When she's frustrated, everyone cries into the soup.

Stifled passion doesn't just sizzle on the back burner. It also makes the outhouse to burst into flame while the middle daughter is taking a shower. Naked as the day she was born, she is raptured by Mexican revolutionaries and rides off into the sunset on horseback. Years later, she returns to the family as the head of her own junta.

Like Water For Chocolate establishes all the food metaphors that were used in subsequent movies: food as a metaphor for sex, food as the medium for family conflict, food as the common emotional denominator. All these themes would be picked up in Taiwanese director, Ang Lee's celebrated Eat, Drink, Man, Woman the next year.

Eat, Drink, Man, Woman

Jia-Chen (Chien-Lien Wu) is a crackling, modern Taiwanese woman whose only concession to Chinese tradition is to show up at her father's once-a-week family dinners. She's smart, she's ambitious, she understands how to live in a fast-paced, Westernized Taiwan where she is a high-power corporate airline executive. Her forays into casual sex complete her divorce from the China of her ancestors.

You could cut her impatience--with her father's claustrophobic little family soirees--with a knife. She's champing to reform her virginal old-maid sister (Kuei-Mei-Yang), eager to light the fire of corporate ambition under her directionless kid sister (Yu-Wen Wang). And she's still resentful that her father--a famous chef--didn't teach her to cook.

Jia-Chen is clearly meant to be the psychological compass of this film which was crafted with a bi-hemisphere audience in mind. Her rejection of tradition, her success, and her ambivalence toward her father and sisters all make her the pivotal character--especially for the western viewer.

But for all her corporate savvy, Jia-Chen misses the important signals that would help her truly understand her family members--rather than dismissing them as outmoded stereotypes. She fails to see her older sister's conversion to Christianity as a rebellion in its own right--a lateral move away from Chinese tradition.

Dreamy and easily provoked to tears, school teacher Jia-Jen (the eldest sister) is probably harder for western audiences to comprehend. But she's also one of the most fascinatingly complex characters ever burned onto celluloid. Her family believes her to be the incurable victim of a broken heart. They don't see that the fantasy world she has constructed insulates her from a traditional agenda as well or better than Jia-Chen's corporate career. Jia-Chen's quieter rejection of tradition predicts the sudden changes she will make in her life--when she is good and ready to make them.

The youngest sister, Jia-Ning, is largely beneath her family's notice--until she drops her own bomb at the dinner table. She's engaged, she's pregnant, and the boy she's about to marry is the son and heir of a wealthy tycoon.

You'd never predict, in this updated fairy tale of three sisters, that the eldest and most modern would be the last one left at home having dinner with her father, but that's exactly what happens.

This film is so layered, I hate to think how rich it must be for someone who also understands the cuisine. The Tex/Mex remake, Tortilla Soup, lacks the subtlety of the original, but there's so much going on in the story line that I can still recommend the remake for those who relate better to Spanglish than to Taiwanese.

Big Night

When Italian immigrants poured into the United States in the 1950s, the American love affair with Italian food was born. That love affair would make the fortunes of some and break the hearts of others.

Meet Primo (Tony Shalhoub) and Segundo (Stanley Tucci), two brothers who come to America to make their fortunes on the slim, but real thread of Primo's cooking talent. Their names tell you volumes about their relationship before the credits even stop rolling. Primo (literally "first") is the older brother and, as such, exercises a first-born's well-intentioned tyranny over the family enterprise.

Primo is old world in all the best ways. He thinks talent should be sufficient; he has no head for business and no interest in learning it. His unbending European standards of excellence are constantly affronted by American crassness. Can't his customers see how skillfully the seafood is blended into the risotto? It took him hours. But no, they expect to see chunks. Primo is a study in non-adaptation and a representative of all our would-have-been forefathers who came, saw, wept, and fled back to Europe.

While Primo chafes against American cultural hegemony, his little brother, Segundo, is being quietly seduced by this new world, its wide open spaces, its fabulously finned cars, its wonderfully available women. There isn't a chance he'll go back to Paris now that he's cruised around Iowa in a flame-red Thunderbird with an automatic cigarette lighter.

Segundo is the true American in this family--the one who sees how easy it would be to make a buck, by just giving these philistines what they want--meatballs and a diva singing 'O Sole Mio.'

This food film leads up to a HUGE Italian dinner for about twenty people. The preparation and presentation of the dishes is depicted in such loving, erotic detail, it's sure to evoke gasps from almost every viewer and especially fans of Italian cuisine. Directors Tucci and Campbell Scott lead you through the many stages of a really memorable dinner--from excited anticipation, to orgasmic enjoyment, to satiation, to surprise that that was just the appetizer, to groans of surfeit, and finally to the spiritual transcendence that can conclude such a feast. People are weeping at the end of this meal. It's a work of art and a crowning life achievement for the chef.

Dinner Rush

You don't hear a lot about Dinner Rush, but, according to my chef lover, it's the most realistic depiction of a five-star restaurant kitchen that you'll find on film.

Filmed in real time, Dinner Rush takes place, as the title suggests, entirely during one restaurant's two dinner hours. It starts out in the kitchen where the line cooks are draining pasta, sauteing meat, and prepping sauce--all in slow motion. This is where the chef watching the movie with me said, "Wow!"

From there, the film explores in detail, how a fine dinner restaurant puts together its product. You see the wait staff memorizing and practicing the specials, getting the Italian accent just right. You see the raging ego of the head chef who fires one of his line staff for showing up to work with a dull knife.
"This is not a refuge for the incompetent!"

You see blossoming romance, sleazy affairs, drug abuse, all the staples of a thriving kitchen.

On top of that, Dinner Rush explores the evolution of Italian cuisine in America. The spaghetti and meatballs that satisfied our fathers is being inexorably replaced by lighter dishes full of basil and seafood in the top urban restaurants. This evolution is played out as a conflict between the comfortable, sausage-loving restaurant owner (Danny Aiello) and his nouvelle-influenced chef. Just to add a little more grease to the fire, the chef is also the owner's son.

As if that werenąt enough to saute into one film, Sandra Bernhard arrives in a cameo as a REALLY uppity food critic who demands to be fed with "no butter. No butter in anything." As you like it.

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