This is the
second reflection from my three-film essay.
Tortilla
Soup is a film about a father and his three daughters. As a father of
three daughters, I love father-daughter stories. This is a fun movie centered
on a family, its flaws, its dramas, and its food. The 2001 film was not a box
office hit, nor was it critically acclaimed. The NY Times called it
“forgettable,” while another reviewer called it “fast food.”
The
Mexican-America father is a semi-retired chef and restaurant owner living in
Southern California who loves to cook large traditional Sunday meals from
scratch. He is unusual as a chef because he lost his senses of smell and taste
after the death of his wife. His three daughters want out of the traditional
family home to live life on their own. The professional cooking show quality of
the film’s meal preparation scenes (done by the Food Network, by the way) is
just fun for those who love home-cooked ethnic food that is at the center of
weekly extended family life.
The oldest
daughter, a teacher, is an uptight evangelical Christian who left the family’s
culturally traditional Catholic church. She elopes and marries a fellow
teacher. The other two sisters, a businesswomen and a student, have affairs.
All of this leaves the father feeling left out of their lives, so he wants to
sell the family home. Any family movie will show the flaws and drama of family
life, even the family of an up-from-the-bootstrap middle class Mexican-American
restaurant owner. The second generation’s rebellion and drama is put into a sharper
focus because of the Mexican-American context. “Don’t speak Spanglish!”
Some of the
family meals in the film reminded me of when I traveled to Ybor City in Tampa
to meet my wife’s Spanish relatives for the first time. Some had come by way of
Cuba, but all the first generation came from the Northwestern Province of
Asturias in Spain in the 1920s. My wife was third generation, but her Abuela
taught her many of the traditional Spanish Sunday family food dishes. Abuela’s
first meal for me was a tortilla of eggs, onions and potatoes fried in olive
oil in a cast-iron pan. She wanted me to feel welcome – after all, I was going
to marry her oldest grandchild even though I was a protestant, as was her son,
my future father-in- law. Mix that culinary scene with my wife’s mother’s
traditional American Southern country cooking and two tours in Germany and you
can never tell where in the world the food will be from on our dinner table.
Food is often the center of hospitality, of making people feel welcome in a
home. We even have a McFarland multi-generation family CD of recipes, “Over the
Lips and Onto the Hips,” with all the comfort food and traditional family food
from all the branches of the family.
How does Tortilla
Soup end? The newly extended family is in a restaurant run by the
middle daughter, around a restaurant table eating an updated fusion of
traditional and modern recipes. The remarried father whose new wife is
expecting gets his senses of smell and taste back after sampling his daughter’s
fusion food.
I
love the way Luke’s gospel takes us on a tour of the dinner parties and tables
Jesus shared with outsiders, sinners and strangers. Families share tables and
flaws, but grace can turn them into a banquet. Conversations with our neighbors
and their families often can begin with food, as Luke shows us Jesus
doing. Tortilla Soup is a
banquet of film about a flawed family, fun, and food.
