The Sweet Taste of ‘Chocolate’ : Director Alfonso Arau’s Fanciful Film Has the Recipe for a Hit

Alfonso Arau has acted in American movies ranging from “The Wild Bunch” to the more recent “Three Amigos” and “Romancing the Stone.” Always, he finds to his disappointment, he gets offered the same type of role.

“I can play only bandidos, “ he said ruefully during a recent interview in Los Angeles. “If you want to be a star, you have to play the good guys.”

But Arau is not exactly sitting in his office in Mexico City waiting for Hollywood to turn him into the next Kevin Costner. A producer and director as well as an actor, he took on his biggest project ever when he made the film version of one of Mexico’s best-selling novels, the 1990 “Como Agua Para Chocolate” (“Like Water for Chocolate”).

The prospect of directing the film was daunting, even to a man who exudes self-confidence . It so happened that the novel was written by his wife, screenwriter Laura Esquivel, and Arau thought a woman director might be better suited for a fanciful recipe-laden story seen from a female point of view.

“It was a big challenge for me because I considered the book so feminine that I was afraid I would not be sensitive enough to get this onto the screen,” Arau said. “But Laura wanted me to direct it because I was closer to the project than anyone else.”

So he put himself “at the service of the book,” following it very closely, and made sure his wife, also author of the screenplay, was on the set as often as possible. The result was a film that has broken box-office records in Mexico while winning numerous international awards and widespread praise for skillfully capturing the novel’s “magic realism”--the blending of the mundane with the fantastic that has become a hallmark of Latin American literature.

Made for $2 million in government loans, “Chocolate,” which won 10 Ariels, the Mexican Oscar, is the most expensive movie ever produced in that country. Many expected the film to win an Academy Award nomination for best foreign film. The fact that it was overlooked, just as it was making its U.S. debut in New York to almost universal acclaim, left Arau “very depressed,” he said. “Everybody was sure we were going to be at least nominated.”

Set in 1910 against the backdrop of the Mexican revolution, “Chocolate” tells the story of Tita (Lumi Cavazos), the youngest of three sisters, who is required by tradition to forgo marriage in order to care for her cold-hearted widowed mother, called Mama Elena (Regina Torne). Prevented from marrying Tita, her boyfriend, Pedro (Marco Leonardi), agrees to wed her eldest sister (Yareli Arizmendi) in order to remain near the woman he loves.

Tita, in her misery, repairs to the kitchen of her mother’s ranch, whipping up extraordinary dishes that mirror her rebellious emotions--a wedding cake for her sister and Pedro that makes everybody sick and a rose-petal sauce that causes another sister (Claudette Maille) almost to ignite with passion.

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The film’s title, drawn from a saying that is obscure even in Spanish-speaking countries outside Mexico, dates back to the Aztecs and refers to the exact moment when water reaches the perfect temperature for melting chocolate, Arau explained.

“So when you are like water for chocolate, you are about to explode in two ways: first, if you are furious, and second, if you are erotically excited,” the director said.

In the United States, the title has been translated literally, but publishers and movie distributors in other countries have not felt obliged to retain the original meaning. In Italy, for example, it is known as “Sweet Like Chocolate,” while in France it is referred to as “Bitter Chocolate.” The English call it “Like Water for Hot Chocolate.” To the Poles it is “Red Roses and Tortillas.”

Esquivel’s favorite is the Japanese version, “The Legend of the Rose Petal Sauce.” “It’s more poetic,” her husband said.

Arau, an ebullient, youthful and articulate man of 60 with a thick mustache, believes the movie has captivated diverse audiences because the tradition that threatens to ruin Tita’s life exists in many cultures. Tita herself is modeled after his wife’s great-great-aunt of the same name, who was forced to take care of her mother until the latter’s death at the age of 92.

“Laura wanted to make a homage to her, but she wrote a totally different Tita--a winner,” he said. “The whole struggle of Tita is not to let the tradition be perpetuated.”

Arau has a simple explanation for why he chose Leonardi, a non-Spanish-speaking Italian who starred in the Academy Award-winning “Cinema Paradiso,” to portray a Mexican heartthrob. “Because I didn’t find an actor in Mexico who was so beautiful.”

Leonardi learned his lines phonetically but the Spanish dialogue in “Chocolate” was dubbed by a Mexican actor. “Pedro was the most difficult character. . . . The audience hates him,” Arau reflected. “Why doesn’t he just grab Tita and run away? But he’s a gentleman, he follows the rules.

“Why is Tita in love with this guy? Because he is beautiful. Beauty has to do with romantic love.”

Although he lists George Lucas and Steven Spielberg among the directors he most admires, Arau shies away from special effects, choosing instead to treat the magical as matter-of-fact. Tita, for example, had begun crocheting a bedspread when Pedro first spoke to her of marriage. By the time she finally leaves her mother’s house, the bedspread has grown so huge that it has to be dragged behind her carriage like a kilometer-long train to a wedding gown.

“I just see it as a long, long quilt, and I see it in a very realistic way,” Arau said. “I don’t put a glow on it. I don’t underline that it’s magic.”

Arau said with a smile that some of this magic rubbed off on the cast while they spent 17 weeks at a ranch he had built in the Mexican desert, working in what he describes as very difficult conditions. “Everybody started to become their characters. Tita and Pedro really fell in love. Gertrudis (the middle sister, who runs away with the revolutionary army) started to feel too free. Mama Elena became terrible.”

Born in Mexico City, Arau came to filmmaking relatively late in life. He planned to follow his father and become a doctor, but after meeting his first wife, a ballerina, he quit medicine to study dancing and drama. After achieving some success as a classical dancer, he turned to comedy, following that up by learning pantomime in France. For four years, he toured with a one-man pantomime show, returning to Mexico after the doors to the previously closed directors’ union were opened to outsiders.

For a quarter-century he has been working only in film, directing a half-dozen movies in Mexico and acting in more than two dozen there and another dozen in the United States. He still aspires to play a leading man, and doesn’t think his accent poses an insurmountable obstacle. “I can get rid of it,” he said.

Meanwhile, he hopes to begin production this summer on a “mystical epic film,” with a screenplay adapted by his wife from a 1989 biography of Regina Teucher. The daughter of a German spiritualist and Mexican Indian, who was educated by lamas in Tibet, Teucher became a martyr at the age of 20 when she lost her life in the October, 1968, students’ uprising in Mexico City.

Arau said “Regina,” projected to cost $6 million, must be filmed in English in order to recoup its costs.

Even so, Arau is optimistic about the future of Mexican films. Following the 1940s and ‘50s, dubbed the golden age of Mexican cinema because of the work of directors such as Emilio Fernandez and Alejandro Galindo and the legendary cinematographer Gabriel Figueroa, the middle class started turning to American movies, sending the local industry into serious decline. What was left were cheap formula movies for mass audiences, many of them exported to Los Angeles and other American cities with large Spanish-speaking audiences.

Under the current government, however, it is becoming easier to get private financing for better films, Arau said. “We are in the beginning of a new era for Mexican cinema,” he said. “ ‘Como Agua’ . . . recovered the (middle-class) audience.”