Wine With Your Chocolate? : Grape juice splashes and ruby droplets glisten in ‘A Walk in the Clouds,’ a sure sign of Alfonso Arau’s ‘Like Water for Chocolate’ touch.

An otherworldly visual splendor laced with sensuality, spirituality and unexpected humor helped make Alfonso Arau’s last film, “Like Water for Chocolate,” an international hit of proportions never before realized by a Mexican director. The same elements are abundantly evident here on the set of Arau’s new film, “A Walk in the Clouds.”

A white-haired woman is standing in the middle of a vast wine barrel blowing on a conch shell as if it were a horn. Deep green vineyards undulate in precise rows across the Northern California hillside behind her, and in front of her, actors dressed in the same sienna hues as the soil turn in the four directions of the compass.

As the strange trumpeting fades, mariachis begin to strum their guitars and grape crushers move around the wooden vat, clapping their hands in time to the lilting melody. Men lift young women into the barrel, where, tucking their skirts high around their hips, the girls dance in a lusty circle, going faster as the tempo picks up.

Grape juice splashes, ruby droplets glistening in the dusty air. Keanu Reeves is pushed into the vat, where he faces Aitana Sanchez-Gijon, a dimpled brunette who smiles flirtatiously at him as the chorus of figures pulse around them singing, “Crush the grapes, crush the grapes, crush the grapes.”

Watching the scene come to vivid life, Alfonso Arau cannot contain himself. “Es como Boccaccio!” the director hisses happily to Emmanuel (Chivo) Lubezki, his director of photography here and on “Like Water for Chocolate.”

Seeing an onlooker smile at the comparison of this gorgeous but relatively innocent scene to the decadent bacchanals created by the author of “The Decameron,” Arau strolls over.

His eyes twinkling, he stage-whispers, “All the girls’ panties are from the 1940s--it would have been a pity to hide them.”

Arau’s good humor is contagious. Anthony Quinn, who plays Sanchez-Gijon’s grandfather, practices breathing exercises with Reeves and chatters away in fluent Italian, telling jokes to Giancarlo Giannini, who plays Sanchez-Gijon’s father. When the local newspaper, the St. Helena Star, reported that “A Walk in the Clouds” filmmakers had received a ticket from the village police for not having the proper filming permit, the piece finished on this note: “Officer issues citation. Anthony Quinn says, ‘Hi to all.’ ”

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“A Walk in the Clouds,” which opens Friday, stars Reeves as a G.I. returning from World War II to a wife whom he barely knows and with whom he has nothing in common. Hitting the road as a traveling salesman as a way to escape from the stifling situation, he meets a young Mexican American woman (Sanchez-Gijon) who has a problem. She is pregnant, her lover has left her, and she is terrified to tell her domineering father, the owner of a successful Napa Valley winery.

Reeves gallantly offers to pretend to be her husband for one night for the sake of her family, which also includes Anjelica Aragon as her mother and Evangelina Elizondo as her grandmother.

The movie is loosely based on a 1942 Italian neo-realist film, “Quattro Passi Fra Le Nuvole” (Four Steps in the Clouds), by director Alessandro Blasetti. In 1987, David and Jerry Zucker acquired the rights to an English version of the story that changed the protagonists to Italian Americans.

But the movie didn’t really come together, according to their producing partner, Gil Netter, until Arau joined the project in 1993. Since then, things have happened very fast.

Asked how he managed to get Reeves and Arau--two of Hollywood’s hottest new commodities--together for “A Walk in the Clouds,” Netter just grins and says, “There’s been an angel watching over this production.”

Although he wrote the final screenplay for Arau less than 12 months before filming started, in early summer 1994, screenwriter Robert Mark Kamen (“The Power of One,” “The Karate Kid,” “Lethal Weapon 3”) points out that it is a very rare film that gets made in a year. Getting it produced so quickly is even more unusual, he adds, because “it’s a period piece and a movie about a Mexican family. By the standards of conventional Hollywood filmmaking, nobody should be allowing us to do this.”

Arau, however, says that Fox and his producers have been nothing but supportive of his vision, and there was no hesitation when he asked to change the ethnic background of the family, making them upper-class Mexicans who had fled their native country during the revolution.

“I guess because of the success of ‘Like Water for Chocolate,’ everybody respects me at the studio, and everybody says yes to everything I ask--within reality, no?” he says.

“The script was good, but it was full of Italian stereotypes. With the new script, suddenly everything changed. I have an interest in showing to world audiences another aspect of Mexico that they don’t know. There is a whole culture there and it is a 4,000-year-old culture.”

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In this particular scene, the symbol of that history is the conch shell, which was used by the Aztecs to summon the gods to ancient ceremonies. That the Napa Valley has certainly never seen anything like it doesn’t seem important. The symbolism seems completely appropriate to a production said to be watched over by angels, where the crew includes camera operator Rodrigo Garcia, whose father is Gabriel Garcia Marquez, the famous Colombian author most identified with magical realism.

“It was not in the script,” says Arau, about the shell. “But the work of the director is to convert words into images.”

His job, he says, is aided by his heritage. “Mexicans live in both fantasy and reality all the time. That’s why magical realism was invented by a Mexican writer, Juan Rulfo, who wrote a book called ‘Pedro Carmo.’ Gabriel Garcia Marquez was inspired by Juan Rulfo to write ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude.’

“So for us there is not only this reality; there is another reality, and we are aware of it. I guess whenever I am going to say something, I see this other reality and I just put them together.”

Before 1992’s “Like Water for Chocolate,” Arau had written, directed and produced a number of critically acclaimed films in Mexico and won several Ariele Awards (Mexico’s Oscars). But in the United States he had been mostly known as an actor, having starred in Alejandro Jodorowsky’s surreal classic “El Topo” and appeared in “The Wild Bunch” and “Romancing the Stone,” among other films.

Now, everything about Arau--from the rakish tilt of his weather-beaten Panama hat to the horsy grin and boundless energy--seem to shout his pleasure at being taken seriously as a director in this country. Besides having a larger audience for his work, going from “Chocolate’s” $2-million budget to “Clouds’ ” approximately $20-million budget has been a revelation.

“This is the first time in my life that I am shooting a film from Monday to Friday without having to go on Saturday and Sunday to get the money for the next week,” he says. “It’s a blessing to me and I’m very grateful.”

Sanchez-Gijon, 26, a rising star in Spain, where she has made more than a dozen films, agrees that American filmmaking is less pressured. “Here we have more time to do everything,” she says during a break from filming. “In Spain, we have no money so instead of shooting three months, we have to do it in 1 1/2 months. You have to run, run, run, and you are very stressed.”

As the founder of Strion, her own Madrid-based theater group for young actors, Sanchez-Gijon appreciates Arau’s directorial style. “He works a lot with actors, gives us time to do things properly. The most important thing is that he is also an actor. We do a warm-up every day, and he gives us a lot of time to concentrate because he wants us to be very emotional, very open.”

The buzz around the production is that Reeves, 30, is especially right for the part of the American soldier, Paul Sutton--his first real romantic lead.

“I’ll tell you, nobody has ever seen Keanu like this before,” Kamen says. “This role suits him because it’s lost, and he’s a bit lost and feels it. Nobody is going to take him lightly again.”

“He’s got that sweet soulfulness,” Netter says. “He’s like Jimmy Stewart or Gary Cooper--stoic, the one who’s good in life, the dreamer.”

Dressed in baggy pants held up by suspenders, a faded flannel shirt and a shaved-around-the-ears soldier’s haircut, Reeves looks younger than his years and a lot more vulnerable than in his recent roles in “Speed” and “Johnny Mnemonic.”

“Working with Alfonso is very good. He’s setting up a great situation with his actors here--we’re all trying to do our best work,” Reeves says.

Though polite, Reeves is not exactly loquacious. He tends to simplify his comments to the point that they sound as if they’ve been written and rehearsed in advance. He’s shy about opinions and doesn’t want to venture a guess, for example, about what makes working with Arau different from working with Bernardo Bertolucci, or Francis Ford Coppola, or Kenneth Branagh, or Gus Van Sant, who directed him in “Little Buddha,” “Bram Stoker’s Dracula,” “Much Ado About Nothing,” and “Even Cowgirls Get the Blues” and “My Own Private Idaho,” respectively.

Nor does he have much to say about this particular scene, other than “it was good fun--but a little slippery in there.” Sanchez-Gijon, he says, is “very easy to work with.”

Reeves laughs self-consciously when asked whether he has had any time to enjoy himself during the shoot. He says he has tasted a couple of glasses of wine, but basically, “I tend to focus on what I’m doing. That’s where my happiness lies.”

This is the second time Reeves has been in the Napa Valley. The first was when he was rehearsing for “Dracula” with Coppola, who owns a vineyard here.

“I find Napa very sensual,” he says. “I find the heat pleasant, and I’m trying to let that into my acting.”

Reeves says he was drawn to “A Walk in the Clouds” because of the situation between the lovers. “It’s very romantic. It goes back to an older time, and yet there’s a present-ness about it. There’s the modernness of her being [unexpectedly] pregnant--it’s a situation that could be happening now.”

What struck him most profoundly about the story, he adds, “is the two individuals come together with respect and with a sensual attraction. It’s about honor, commitment and love.”

Arau chimes in: “ ‘A Walk in the Clouds’ is about love and life--it’s a chant to all family and human values and the love of human beings for the earth.”

Although Arau says he would like to direct all kinds of movies in the future, there will be a common link of emotion.

“I want to make a lot of humor, a lot of magic, a lot of human problems. I have a lot of passion, but for me it also has to be fun. Because you can have awards, you can have profits, but the only thing that you are going to take with you when you die is the joy of having worked in your films. The joy of making films is my reward.”