Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Like Water for Chocolate
1992 · Alfonso Arau · Like Water for Chocolate on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 3 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Watch the kitchen glow amber against the rest of the house. (light)
Emmanuel Lubezki and Steven Bernstein light the kitchen in candlelight and firelight, deep ambers and earth tones, against a cooler, more ordinary register everywhere else in the house.
Payoff: The kitchen looks like the one room in the house where feeling is allowed to show.
Watch Tita's face while she works, rather than her words. (performance)
Lumi Cavazos plays her almost wordlessly, registering desire and grief through small, held expressions rather than through dialogue.
Payoff: Her face is doing the talking her situation forbids her mouth from doing. In the reading: icon of quality (qualisign). Deleuze calls a face that holds one quality without discharging it a qualisign, and Tita's face banks that feeling scene after scene.
Watch the camera linger on hands working the food. (setting)
Close, tactile shots follow Tita's hands kneading, chopping, and folding ingredients longer than the story needs to move forward.
Payoff: The dish becomes the one place her longing is allowed to go. In the reading: fetish. Deleuze calls an object charged with more feeling than it can hold a fetish, and here every dish she makes carries that charge.
Listen for the sizzle and chop under every kitchen scene. (sound)
Sound design keeps cooking noise as present as dialogue, so the kitchen sounds like an instrument the film is always playing.
Payoff: Eating and feeling are treated as the same sense throughout, before a single dish takes effect.
Watch where Mamá Elena sits and who she can see from there. (staging)
The dining room is staged as her command post, positioned to survey the daughters, while the kitchen stays just out of her direct line of sight.
Payoff: The house is built like a system of surveillance, with the kitchen as its one blind spot.
The 3 rewatch keys open on this page when you choose "Seen it?".
Carry this in: Watch what each dish is doing to the table before you learn what it means.