Feeds
When a young woman (Lumi Cavazos) is kept from marrying the man she loves, her culinary creations become the manifestation of her broken heart. Shedding a few tears into the batter of the wedding cake she makes when her lover marries her older sister, the resulting dessert makes the entire party weep. When he gives her a dozen roses and she uses the petals in a quail recipe, the result is a dish that makes everyone at the table feel, well, extra spicy. Many movies tap into our feelings about eating, but this is one where a chef’s creations express the emotional state of their creator. Mexican cuisine gets a series of delectable close-ups in this adaptation of the Laura Esquivel novel (featuring a screenplay by Esquivel herself).
Largely forgotten among the heyday of MGM musicals in the post-WWII period is 1956’s “The Opposite Sex,” a disappointing attempt to inject men, music and Metrocolor into George Cukor’s 1939 classic “The Women,” which featured an all-female cast. Whereas “The Women” featured immortals like Norma Shearer, Rosalind Russell and Joan Crawford exchanging barbed dialogue by Anita Loos and Claire Boothe Luce, “Sex” gave us such inadequate substitutes as June Allyson and Joan Collins; even worse, the man these two were fighting over was no longer unseen on screen — he had somehow become the utterly bland, pre-“Airplane!” Leslie Nielsen.
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