'Like Water for Chocolate' Review: HBO Latino Adapts a Beloved Romance

Like a fine mole, magical realism requires incredible complexity to yield something that is then perceived as quite simple. Fifty different types of chilies become something broadly described as a chocolaty sauce. Sentiment, whimsy, romance, the supernatural and some measure of grounding combine into a mix that even your friendly neighborhood culture critic might only be able to say works or doesn’t. And two people perceiving an identical mélange of elements might respond to the flavor profiles in wholly different ways.

Take, for a purely hypothetical example, Alfonso Arau’s 1992 adaptation of Laura Esquivel‘sLike Water for Chocolate. Already a beloved hit in its day, affection for the movie seems only to have grown since. It’s impossible to quibble with Arau’s tonal commitment, or with the sumptuous cinematography from Steven Bernstein and, in one of his earliest films, Emmanuel Lubezki. But by tipping its magical realism so firmly toward “magical,” it becomes a love story without any developed characters or much chemistry, especially in the butchered American cut.

If it plays for you, though, it plays for you. And I know its steamy, swooning charms play for many people.

Through the first two episodes, HBO/HBO Latino/Max’s new adaptation — credited as being based upon both Esquivel’s original book and its long-delayed sequel — is a version of the story that works better for me and my own tele-culinary preferences.

Without entirely abandoning the magic, the Spanish-language drama takes advantage of its six-episode run time to better flesh out its realist aspects. Contextualizing the characters and class underpinnings against a specific Mexican Revolutionary backdrop emphasizes the narrative’s themes in a way that made it far easier for me to invest in the romance, anchored by enchanting leading lady Azul Guaita.

Of course, if you find that these layers impede what you find so opulent and blunt about the original, the new Salma Hayek Pinault-produced Like Water for Chocolate might not hold you in its thrall. Plus, it makes at least one very bad structural choice that I’m still scratching my head over.

As adapted by head writer Francisco Javier Royo Fernández (credited as “Curro Royo”), the series starts off very similarly to earlier iterations. We begin in the Mexican state of Coahuila with Elena (Irene Azuela) giving birth to Tita in a deluge of tears, brought on by onions as well as by a misery that won’t be explained for a while.

Sixteen years later, Tita (Guaita) spends most of her time in the kitchen, learning under the watch of the family’s loving cook, Nacha (Ángeles Cruz). Tita senses that Elena feels less affection toward her than she does for older sisters Rosaura (Ana Valeria Becerril), who is slightly plain (in TV terms, not in actual human terms) and slightly bitter, and Gertrudis (Andrea Chaparro), who is a budding firebrand.

Elena’s chilliness comes to a head when Tita receives a marriage proposal from Pedro (Andrés Baida), a neighboring ranch heir who’s been in love with her since childhood, and Elena makes it clear that this union is out of the question. In the movie and I believe in the book (I read it 30 years ago, so I can’t remember much with certainty), it’s immediately established that there’s a family tradition in which the youngest daughter cannot marry and must instead dedicate her life to her mother. Here, however, it’s initially presented as more maternal meanness.

So Pedro makes a choice. He will marry Rosaura, because it’s the only way to stay close to Tita.

For her part, Tita continues to refine her cooking skills, with a catch: To eat Tita’s food is to feel what she feels. Literally. Not figuratively, in that way that’s true of food from any chef. “Whether it was joy or sorrow, everything was infused with her. It was as if Tita were another ingredient,” a voiceover explains.

The peculiar thing is that this reveal comes at a moment when it’s wholly irrelevant. Sure, Tita has just made cream fritters for Pedro and they make him happy. But a person feeling glad to eat good food hardly seems probative of a magical manifestation. That snippet of narration could have been dropped anywhere in the series, and placing it here drains what ought to be a key scene of its sense of discovery. Telling us about the power, rather than letting us experience it, is a borderline inexplicable choice.

Better to never spell it out at all (audiences are clever) than to explain it too soon or too overtly. If you think this choice suggests a certain contempt on the show’s part for the “magical” part of magical realism, I won’t quibble with you.

Maybe I’m simply more accepting of the connection between food and love in tangible, non-ephemeral terms. For example, I generally liked the Zoe Saldaña Netflix drama From Scratch, because it had impeccably photographed food and impeccably photographed actors pitching woo in impeccably captured European locations. That was sufficient for my definition of magic, and perhaps that’s how this Like Water for Chocolate intends it as well.

While it’s not operating on a Lubezki level of impeccability, as Arau’s visually ravishing film was, Like Water for Chocolate is quite beautiful. The series gets tremendous value out of its Mexican period locations, and certain sequences really are breathtaking. The grammar of food porn has dramatically evolved in the past decade, and the influence of the Chef’s Table brand of presentation is evident throughout, right down to careful onscreen identification of pivotal dishes in their completed form.

Around the food, there’s some effort put into building out the world of 1910s Mexico, including the clash between landowners and their Indigenous serfs, the mounting public frustration with the administration of General Porfirio Díaz and the surging undercurrent of several converging revolutionary forces. This is all in the backdrop of the book, and it may be in the full director’s cut of Arau’s movie as well. But it sure isn’t in the cut that broke box office records in the United States, in which growing political and racial chasms are left as breadcrumbs for those who know to look.

Having Pedro be a budding progressive and supporter of Francisco Madero gives him a secondary character detail in addition to his love for Tita, and the entire series is more interesting as a result. You can see how his interest in breaking out of class-based societal constructs complements what Tita is doing in terms of gender-based constructs. It gives their connection a depth beyond the basic fact that they’re both pretty, which is all Pedro and Tita really have going for them in the movie.

It helps that Guaita quickly emerges as the sort of actress who would probably have chemistry with a Pop-Tart (and Baida is hunkier than your average toaster pastry). As fits a character who comes into the world in a flood of tears, Guaita is especially adroit at letting any extreme of emotion come to the surface in lachrymosity. Like Tita with her recipes, she infuses joy or sadness or longing into every scene, but not in the near-pantomime style that most of the actors utilized in the Arau film. I’ve seen none of Guaita’s previous credits — Mexican telenovelas and teen dramas, it would appear — but this is the sort of exposure that should capture the attention of American casting directors.

Though Elena and Rosaura are drafted as wicked mother and sister in a story with a lot of Cinderella in it, both Azuela and Becerril find enough fragility in their performances to keep the characters from playing as mere opposition to Tita’s general goodness. And while Gertrudis’ arc is being held for the last two-thirds of the season, Chaparro has already seeded a feistiness that should pay off.

My instinct through the first third of the season is that this is an example of a narrative improved by expanding the screen time. The characters are already more complex, and the world already more fully realized. When it comes to Like Water for Chocolate, do you want it to make logical sense or do you merely want it to feel right? I think this version does enough of each to make a familiar story worth telling again.

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