A feminist yarn of personal oppression and liberation set against a background of large-scale oppression and liberation: the Mexican Revolution. (A distant and dim background, most of the time.) The youngest of three daughters, bound by family tradition to stay home and care for her mother till the day one of them dies, has the effrontery to fall in love with a secret suitor, who, when the secret comes out, is matched up instead with the eldest daughter. The youngest can only vent her feelings through her cooking: tears of woe added to the wedding-cake batter to induce mass vomiting at the nuptials; drops of blood in a rose-petal sauce to produce a mass aphrodisiac; and so on. One could talk about the fairy-tale elements of all this, or about the "magic realism" of it, or about "multiculturalism" or Mexifeminism or gastroeroticism or whatever. And of course all the while one could be talking just about the Laura Esquivel novel and never mind the Alfonso Arau movie. In the latter context, none of these avenues of discussion can provide escape from a mushy slippery unmoored image that has a hard time simply holding onto the screen. The careless framing, the soft focus, the peach light, the general pallidness, the telephoto collapsing of space, the blurry foreground objects -- all this and more renders the movie all but unwatchable for the discerning eye. With Lumi Cavazos and Marco Leonardi. (1992) — Duncan Shepherd
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