Como Agua para Chocolate (1992)

México Color (Eastmancolor)
Place inside the 100 better movies of the Mexican cinema: 56
 

A production of:	Arau Films Internacional, Instituto Mexicano de Cinematografía (IMCINE), Fondo de Fomento a la Calidad Cinematográfica, Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes (CONACULTA), Coahuila State Government, Aviacsa, Fonatur and Secretaría de Turismo (SECTUR)
Genre:	Romantic
Duration:	143 min.
Sound:	Dolby stereo
Director:	Alfonso Arau
Director Assistants:	Manuel Hinojosa and Óscar Guarín
Production:	Alfonso Arau; ejectives productions: Emilia Arau and Óscar Castillo; production managers: Óscar Castillo, familia Arau and Belinda Uriegas
Guion:	Laura Esquivel, based on their homonymous novel
Photography:	Emmanuel Lubezki and Steven Bernstein
Scenery:	Emilio Mendoza, Ricardo Mendoza and Gonzalo Ceja; atmosphere: Marco Antonio Arteaga, Mauricio de Aguinaco and Denise Pizani
Vestuarie:	Carlos Brown
Make-up:	Julián Tejeda, with the collaboration of Robert Villafuerte and Sergio Espinoza; hairstyles: Lucero Esquivas and Aurora Sánchez
Edition:	Francisco Chiu and Carlos Bolado
Especial Effects:	Raúl Falquir; optical effects: Manuel Sáinz and Francisco Rodríguez
Sound:	Juan Carlos Prieto
Music:	Leo Brouwer; songs: "Estrellita marinera", "Mi querido capitán", "Ojos de juventud", "Jesusita en Chihuahua", "Paso del norte", "Mi carro Ford" y "Estrellita"
Choreography:	Farnesio de Bernal
Artist repart:	Claudia Becker and Felipe Fernández

Repart:

Regina Torné	....	mamá Elena
Lumi Cavazos	....	Tita
Marco Leonardi	....	Pedro
Mario Iván Martínez	....	doctor John Brown
Ada Carrasco	....	nana Nacha
Yareli Arizmendi	....	Rosaura
Claudette Maillé	....	Gertrudis
Joaquín Garrido	....	sargento Treviño
Pilar Aranda	....	Chencha
Margarita Isabel	....	Paquita Lobo
Farnesio de Bernal	....	cura
Arcelia Ramírez	....	narradora, bisnieta de Tita
Farnesio de Bernal	....	cura
Sandra Arau	....	Esperanza
Andrés García, Jr.	....	Alex Brown
David Ostrosky	....	Juan de la Garza
Rodolfo Arias	....	Juan Hernández
Regino Herrera	....	Nicolás
Genaro Aguirre	....	Rosalío
Brígida Alexander	....	tía Mary
Amado Ramírez	....	papá de Pedro
Socorro Rodríguez	....	amiga de Paquita
Rafael García Zuazua	....	padrino
Rafael García Zuazua, Jr.	....	Alex Brown, niño
Edurne Ballesteros	....	Tita adolescente
Melisa Mares	....	Rosaura niña
Gabriela Canudas	....	Rosaura adolescente
Natalia de la Fuente	....	Gertrudis niña
Beatriz Elías	....	Gertrudis adolescente
Rodolfo Mejía	....	venerable maestro
Ricardo Mendoza	....	primer vigilante
Jaime R. Rodríguez	....	maestro masón
Osvaldo Martínez	....	maestro masón
Javier Mares	....	maestro masón
Miguel Mares	....	maestro masón
Jorge Vizales	....	maestro masón

Synopsis:
History of love and good food located in the border Mexico of century principles twenty. Tita and Pedro are blocked their love when Mom Elena decides that Tita, her smaller daughter, you/he/she should be single to take care of her in her age. Enmedio of the scents and flavors of the kitchen traditional Mexican, Tita will suffer long years for a love that will last beyond the time.

Commentaries:
Como agua para chocolate it has meant a very interesting phenomenon inside the contemporary Mexican culture. Laura's first novel Esquivel obtained very good critical and a great success of sales, something very difficult of achieving in a country in which people read very little. Qualified as example of the magic realism, the novel was able to pass over the limits of the mere curiosity and to be placed as the book of fiction more sold in Mexico in the last twenty years.

Its step to the cinema was product of the good luck. Alfonso Arau -actor and very popular Mexican director at the beginning of the seventy - he/she was interested immediately in producing a film based on the novel of Esquivel. After all she could not put many objections, because the interested one in filming the history of love between Tita and Pedro was their husband. In the last years Arau was not very popular in Mexico, because its career had continued her in Hollywood, accidentally the place where to make cinema is something of the most common thing.

This way it arrived Como agua para chocolate the film. Carried out with a much bigger budget that the common one for the Mexican cinema, with technical film Hollywood and with a great commercial sense. The result is a faithful film to the original novel, excellently produced and, mainly, smartly marketed. The ten Arieles granted to this production and the international success of the same one checks that Arau knew what was making very well.

Which was the key of the success of Como agua para chocolate Unquestionably the film possesses many aesthetic values, but this would not be worth of anything if he/she didn't have anything what to count. The cinema is an art that he/she narrates histories visually. So that the public is interested in a movie, this should have interesting characters that a conflict that maintains the spectator's attention live. A good history is the main key for a good film.

Is one able to make an economic success with a success at artistic level? Definitively the answer is yes. Unfortunately the Mexican cinema has been debated in two artificially opposed poles: the -cheap and vulgar commercial cinema - and the cinema of -pretentious and boring art. The Mexican film directors of quality have insisted on being either histories that don't interest us, because they are not understood, or because they don't have elements that appeal to our most elementary attention. Como agua para chocolate found the black thread of the cinema of success: an interesting, well carried out history and, it is not necessary to forget it, marketed in an intelligent way.