LIKE WATER FOR CHOCOLATE (Directed by Alfonsa Arau. Stars Marco Leonardi, Lumi Cavazos, Regina Torne)

Some might consider Like Water For Chocolate a woman’s film, not so much because it is largely set in the kitchen as because the men in it are mostly powerless. Not that the women are automatically sympathetic. Set in turn of the century Mexico, against the backdrop of the revolution, it concentrates on what was going on at home while the guns raged in the distance.

Feminists may have hoped for a more sisterly arrangement: left to their own devices these women persecute and tyrannise one another with a viciousness that suggest they may have done a better job on the frontline than the men.

Tita (Lumi Cavazos), the youngest of three daughters, is forbidden to wed because family tradition dictates she must look after her mother, a vicious shrew who nags her unfortunate offspring whilst alive and continues to haunt her when she had shuffled off this mortal coil.

Tita’s true love Pedro (Marco Leonardi) marries her sister Rosaura (Yareli Arizmedi) in order to remain close at hand, and Tita, apparently developing a mystic bond with her recipes, carries on her relationship through food and punishes those who wrong her with magical meals liable to induce anything from vomiting to excessive libido.

It is after just such an aphrodisiac meal that the third sister Gertrudis casts off her clothes and is swept away naked to the revolution and, presumably, liberation. For all its sensuous cinematography and leanings towards magic realism, Like Water For Chocolate is more melodrama than anything else, sweeping through forty years of unrequited love and gradual empowerment at meal times.

It is all a little too much to digest at one sitting, but the potent mixture of sex and food, with a smattering of politics, should be enough to satisfy most appetites.