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Screening Neoliberalism
Transforming Mexican Cinema, 1988â"2012
By Ignacio M. Sánchez Prado Vanderbilt University Press
Copyright © 2014 Vanderbilt University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8265-1967-2
CHAPTER 1
Nationalism Eroded
Mexican Cinema in Times of Crisis
When one considers both the economic crisis in cinematic production and distribution and the heavy constraints suffered by Mexican film language in the late 1980s, the commercial success of Alfonso Arau's 1992 film Como agua para chocolate is surprising, even more than twenty years later. Showing for the most part on only six screens, in a six-month run, the film grossed an unprecedented six million dollars at the box office in Mexico, and an additional twenty million in the United States. The film is based on an already very successful novel by Laura Esquivel, Arau's wife at the time, and, as Claudine Potvin pointed out in a 1995 article, it follows the book's plot very closely (55). Set between the latter part of the nineteenth century and the end of the Mexican Revolution, Como agua para chocolate tells the story of Tita (Lumi Cavazos), who is forbidden to marry her suitor Pedro (Marco Leonardi) because of a family tradition that forces her to take care of her mother (Regina Torné) throughout the mother's elderly years. Tita turns to cooking in order to express her feelings and the story, both in the film and the book, develops alongside a succession of recipes and around the evolution of the family at large.
Como agua's astounding success has been the subject of ample debate in Latin American film studies and the movie has elicited a highly negative backlash. Deborah Shaw and Brigitte Roller offer a compelling account of this commercial success:
Como agua para chocolate is, then, a highly entertaining, colourful film with all the ingredients for an international box office hit: it is full of romance and characters who conform to Western Christian notions of good and evil, it has an old world rural location, it conforms to traditional notions of Mexicanness, it is set in a pre-sixties and pre-AIDS era and filled with old-fashioned family values, idealizing traditional notions of marriage, womanhood and maternity. More importantly, and more disturbingly ideologically, is the fact that the film works on the level of the emotions and carries the audience with it at all times so that no option is given but to identify with the heroine, a beautiful, wronged Mexican woman whose only aspiration is to reach the sacred position of wife, mother and cook. (91)
In other words, Shaw and Roller attribute the film's success to its apt use of the imaginary of melodrama, which works both within a Mexican cultural context where such narrative structures are highly familiar, and in relation to a conservative international audience that tends to seek a repository of authenticity and tradition in non-Western cinema. Beyond this, one must not overlook the one thing that distinguishes the film from basically every movie made in Mexico since the Golden Age: superior production values. Unlike the gritty palette that characterizes the films of Alcoriza and Ripstein, or the impoverished worlds of post-Bunuelian Mexican film, Como agua para chocolate offers unprecedentedly luscious imagery, focused on a highly beautified world portrayed, through the film's cinematography and art direction, in warm, earthy tones. It is a world suspended in time and space, where the social concerns that characterized the "cinema of solitude" give way to traditionalist worlds in which ideological engagement is supplanted by affect and sensuality.
Most academic critiques of Como agua para chocolate have come from scholars focused on women and gender studies. These scholars usually underscore the ideologically regressive nature of the movie's representation of women, by contending that the film ultimately upholds an idea of the feminine closely connected to the private space and the kitchen. In other words, most critics identify the movie's highly aestheticized appeal to the past as an ideological construction based on a feminine world that, regardless of its focus on women, ultimately sustains both patriarchal values and the ideals of the traditional wife and mother. Without contradicting the evident role of gender set forward by these readings, I would contend the movie is more significant because of the particular way in which it engages national identity. In an article entitled "Consuming Tacos and Enchiladas," Harmony Wu argues that, while the climactic scene in which Pedro and Tita finally make love "should be the foundational moment of the text: the final consummation of the new ideology of the nation," Pedro's death in the middle of the sexual act "frustrates" it (182; emphasis in the original). Furthermore, Wu points out that while the film relies on a feminine narrative voice for most of its story, it ultimately surrenders narrative control to a North American character, Dr. Brown (Mario Ivan Martinez). In consequence, Wu argues, by avoiding the consummation of the forbidden love and surrendering the narration to a male voice, "the resolution promises that there is no danger of subversion to patriarchal order to come out of their union, making their story a cautionary tale rather than a liberating one" (182). Wu's analysis is quite accurate regarding the ideological aporias of the film. It is surprising, nonetheless, that she ultimately reproaches the film for not creating a national narrative, directly invoking Doris Sommer's notion of "foundational fiction" as the basis for the political and allegorical appropriation of melodrama. In view of this perspective, I would argue that the critical interest of Como agua para chocolate lies precisely in the surprising ways in which it prefigures the transformations of Mexican national cinema in the context of NAFTA.
In order to fully engage Arau's movie as a neo-Mexicanist text, the question of gender has to be partially bracketed. To be sure, critics like Wu have done a good job in denouncing the reactionary gender views espoused by the film, a necessary response to the celebration of the movie as a "feminine" film. However, the focus on gender obscures the sociopolitical backdrop against which the film becomes meaningful. Instead, the importance of Como agua para chocolate lies in the ways in which it displaces the social and political functions of national cinema from the ideological to the commercial, while repositioning the site of national identity in film from urban popular classes to the middle class. In a perspicacious article on the book, Victoria Martínez argues that behind the "false feminist message" of the novel (28), one finds elements through which one can tie the book to neoliberal ideology. I would contend, on the basis of this, that the film plays a more crucial role than the book in connecting neoliberalism with its neo-Mexican aesthetic, because of its capacity to supplement Esquivel's narrative with a visual set of referents and with a space of circulation and distribution—that of cinema—much wider than the one available for a work of literature.
Before fully delving into this, it is important to emphasize an interesting fact that, surprisingly, critics have not fully discussed: that Alfonso Arau, of all people, would put forward this kind of aesthetic. Before Como agua para chocolate, Arau was essentially a director of comedies that used humor and parody as devices to counter the darker national world portrayed by the main directors of the "cinema of solitude." His rise to prominence in the Mexican film world came with his second feature, Calzonzin Inspector (1973), about an indigenous man who, after arriving at a small town, is confused with an inspector general, and ultimately uncovers the corruption of local officials. The movie departs from the political disappointment of Alcoriza and other directors of the 1970s and is based on the premise that political corruption is at the core of the problems of an otherwise "authentic" Mexican nation. In a 1979 article on the status of Mexican cinema, critic Jesús Salvador Treviño identifies "a clear and honest perception of Mexican hopes and aspirations while commenting bitterly on those who betray these ideas" (29), proving that this perspective had a degree of resonance with audiences. Furthermore, the nationalist devices in the film are quite obvious and, in some cases, are offshoots of the nationalist cinema of the Golden Age. The fact that the protagonist who embodies "true" national identity is an indigenous man comically recasts a very similar idea represented in Ismael Rodriguez's Tizoc (1957), a Pedro Infante vehicle in which the protagonist is a hard-working Indian who ultimately embodies the values of the nation. Arau's cinema evolved in the late 1970s and 1980s with two films that followed analogous paths of comedic populism: Mojado Power (1979), a picaresque movie about an undocumented worker, which has been identified with a subgenre of border films that use humor and satire to idealize the travails and the survival skills of the immigrant working class (Herrera-Sobek 63; Fojas 10), and Chido Guan: El tacos de oro (1985), a soccer movie that follows the structure of rags-to-riches sports movies.
Arau's Como agua para chocolate is a major departure from the directorial aesthetics of his previous work and even the comedic line he had pursued both as director and actor. In fact, the distance between his 1992 film and everything else he did up to that point suggested to some that the movie could be read as a parody of Mexican national discourse (Niebylski).3 One could also argue that Arau channeled the aesthetics of his wife's book rather than his own, but such an argument is problematic if one considers that Laura Esquivel also wrote the script for Chido Guan. The fact that Arau would direct such a different cinematic product is, I would contend, symptomatic of the key displacement represented by Como agua para chocolate. First and foremost, this displacement is only possible when considering the disjointed relationship between the ideas of the nation put forward by Mexican cinema in the two prior decades vis-à-vis the culture and practices of the intended audiences. As Carlos Monsivais famously argued, Mexican Golden Age cinema was successful in making "great use of what is stored in the cultural memory of the people" ("All the People" 150), thus contributing to an idea of the nation that "mediated between the shock of industrialization and the rural and popular urban experience which has not been prepared in any way for this giant change, a process that from the 40s on modifies the idea of the nation" (151). In a way, cinema from the period was capable of creating a social contract in which the affective identification with figures such as Pedro Infante worked across class and geographic lines, giving film a strong relationship with a "broad spectrum of Mexican society," which turned moviegoing into "an everyday social practice" (Noble 74). From the 1960s on, this social contract started to erode, partly because of the emergence of competing media (like television) and genres (like telenovelas), and partly because of the nature of the work of people such as Alcoriza, whose highly critical representations of the Mexican poor preempted any affective identification with the audience. Arau's work could therefore be read as a succession of attempts to reengage audiences with ideal representations of the Mexican self: his depiction of the noble but betrayed people of Calzonzin Inspector is in stark contrast to Alcoriza's view of popular classes, and the sports-based populism of Chido Guan can be viewed as an effort to galvanize national identity on the eve of the 1986 World Cup, which was organized by Mexico. Como agua para chocolate shares this ethos with all of Arau's early oeuvre: it is an attempt to repair the broken relationship between national cinema and the imagined community, and to restore film as a privileged genre for the articulation of the national.
The cultural conservatism perceived by the film's critics results from Arau's attempt to reengage national discourse. If one considers the fact that the film came out in the middle of the distribution crisis described in the Introduction, it is clear that looking for an audience amid the urban popular classes at the time was a futile pursuit. First, the theaters were simply not there, and many of the venues where the working classes had accessed Mexican films had either shut down or become privatized by 1992. Besides, Arau's own experience in the 1970s and 1980s showed that even when his films had achieved a certain degree of commercial success among the working classes, the films' identification with a nationalist ideology was questionable, especially in a landscape where most commercial films in Mexico came from exploitation genres, like fichera, a popular type of movie named after women who danced for tokens in working-class bars. There were also films that combined the tropes of the ficheras with the emerging culture of narcotráfico, like Raúl Fernández's three-film series Lola la trailera (1983, 1985, 1991), the last installment premiering with some success just a year before Como agua para chocolate. In fact, if one looks in a catalog, like The Mexican Filmography, 1916 through 2001 by David E. Wilt, for movies produced between 1989 and 1992, one will see that the vast majority of the films that attained commercial notoriety were in fact quite lowbrow: music star vehicles like Pedro Galindo's Pelo suelto (1991), starring raunchy pop singer Gloria Trevi; candid-camera comedies like René Cardona's eight-film series La risa en vacaciones (1990–1996); or comedies starring TV and cabaret actors, based on sexualized humor that found its only outlet in cinema, such as Óscar Fentanes's Juan Camaney films (such as Picoso pero sabroso), vehicles for the popular comedian Luis de Alba. A brief glance at this period makes it sufficiently clear that popular audiences were decidedly opting for a cinema that carried no didactic pursuits, and clearly resisting attempts by political filmmakers like Cazals or even Arau to use film for a radical or nationalist message.
Arau's innovative solution was to construct a nationalism that clearly engaged with the values and expectations of a conservative middle class whose cultural ideologies remained in place regardless of the process of modernization brought about in the early years of the neoliberal project. This is, in fact, manifested in many of the ideologies that constitute the film's plot. Victoria Martínez, for instance, has shown that the book "sandwiches the revolution between the Porfiriato [the presidency of Porfirio Díaz against which the Revolution took place] and the neo-liberal possibilities offered in the 90's, and I believe that [Esquivel's] text serves to redirect Mexico toward a new appreciation and recognition of its need of American interests" (39). Moreover, Martínez argues that "because the ensuing Revolution called for social and land reforms and turned decidedly anti-American Esquivel's novel cannot approve of the Revolution" (39). One can supplement this reading by saying that a critical element in the film is the presence of a contemporary Tita (Arcelia Ramírez) whose narration is based on the premise that the values embodied in her family's history remain alive in her. The fact that, in the 1990s, Ramirez's character ultimately claims the history of a landowning family that retained its bourgeois status regardless of the revolution is very telling.
Most classical films on the revolution focused on the value and virtue of the revolutionaries and strongly antagonized the landowning elite. Arau turns this narrative around by treating the revolution as an integral part of bourgeois family history. The best example here is Tita's older sister Gertrudis (Claudette Maillé). Unlike Tita, Gertrudis resists her mother's iron fist. In one of the film's magical realist moments, one of Tita's home cooked meals awakens in Gertrudis a highly sexual scent that attracts a revolutionary who spirits her away and becomes her partner. Gertrudis becomes a soldadera, a woman who fights in the Revolution; as a social type, the soldadera has evolved to embody ideas of women's liberation and political agency. Up to this point, one could claim Gertrudis as a symbol of female independence, and as a successful escapee of the oppressive feminine world constructed by Mamá Elena. However, the character makes a crucial return at the end of both the book and the movie: she shows up at Esperanza's wedding in a Model T (a symbol of social status in the 1930s) and married to the former revolutionary. While there is a minor debate as to whether this marriage shows a previously strong, feminist figure capitulating to the patriarchal order (Martínez 37; Sinnigen 122), the point here is that this revolutionary woman not only returns to the life of her powerful family, but also has powerful connections and a social status of her own, as a member of the ruling elite of revolutionary officers turned postrevolutionary government officials. Gertrudis's example puts forward the main ideological device behind Arau's movie: an attempt to inscribe national history in the very body of the middle class, via sexual relations, food practices, and genetic inheritance. The casting of Claudette Maillé as Gertrudis is significant here, given that the protagonist of the movie (as portrayed by Lumi Cavazos) is a dark-haired, brownish-skinned heroine, whereas Maillé, the actress playing the woman who becomes a revolutionary soldier (and was raised as the protagonist's sister) is white and blonde, and in fact of French origin. Visually, this gesture seems calculated to elicit melodramatic identification from women of the conservative middle class, who would be reluctant to identify with a darker-skinned character.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Screening Neoliberalism by Ignacio M. Sánchez Prado. Copyright © 2014 Vanderbilt University Press. Excerpted by permission of Vanderbilt University Press.
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