I can't honestly see why anyone should want to remake Ang Lee's recent (1994) Taiwanese comedy Eat Drink Man Woman - about a widower who's a retired chef, his three marriageable daughters and the predatory widow who fancies her chances with their dad. But what do I know?
MarÌa Ripoll has run it through the Hollywood blender and it re-emerges as a Latino family sitcom, sentimentalised and caramelised. The "stars" are now vegetable, rather than animal: the mouth-watering ingredients we see Hector Elizondo (or his chef double) chop, slice, scrape, guillotine and miraculously transform into so many mandatory dinner-table banquets that the movie begins to resemble a glossy Sunday food supplement.
Elizondo believes the family that eats together, stays together: but this unconsciously selfish wish of a father reluctant to see his children (Jacqueline Obradors, Tamara Mello, Elizabeth Pena) grow up and go away founders when the girls' rebellious hormones prove stronger than the patriarch's jalapenos: sex will always win against squash-flower soup.
There's the predictable amount of Spanish-style argy-bargy in and out of the kitchen, calmed down by periodic platesmashing, Greek-style. It's easy to take (or leave), depending on your appetite for the noisy insomniacs who comprise the Spanish nation above and below the Rio Grande.
Elizondo, like Morgan Freeman, is incapable of giving a performance of less than heartfelt intelligence, though his character lacks the King Lear-like grumpiness of the Taiwanese papa in Ang Lee's film; and the converted Christian daughter in Lee's original, whose lengthy prayers at the supper table irritate her hungry Buddhist kith and kin, rather loses its comic point when all three siblings are now Catholic born and reared.
Raquel Welch is added to the pot, as the flirtatious granny with the hots for Elizondo. (Joan Collins, where were you?)
Delia Devotees may pick up a recipe or two just by watching "the foods of acclaimed celebrity chefs Mary Sue Milliken and Susan Fenger" get from chopping block to serving platter: but one mystery they won't solve. How come, with enough food to feed Brazil going down their gullet every Sunday, nobody puts on an ounce?
Tortilla Soup
Cert: certPG
