After all, in our sex-saturated age, carnality hardly needs to be sublimated. What little sex there is in Chocolat isn't treated with anything approaching the drooling reverence implicit in shots of Vianne's treats. Food here isn't just a symbol. The mayor is finally undone when, in the midst of his rampage, a speck of chocolate touches his lip, sparking an epic gorge that leaves him chocolate-smeared and unconscious overnight in Vianne's shop window. Food is his temptation and his salvation.
Sex is almost beside the point.
Similarly, in Aphrodite , the descriptions of sex lack the rhapsodic passion of Allende's writing about food. It's almost as if the sex is just an alibi for all this food talk, since these days it's far more socially acceptable to be obsessed with fornication than with dinner. A hysterical wallow through middle-class women's starvation, shameful bingeing, food guilt, and eating disorders, it's the other side of films like Chocolat , and it demonstrates why so many artists feel the need to defiantly assert their appetites. Eating is both so scathingly honest and screechingly melodramatic about many women's anguished relationship to food that it's hard to figure out whether it's empathetic or subtly misogynist. Set at a multigenerational, all-female birthday party in Southern California, it's full of women hiding in corners and bathrooms to shovel cake in their faces, scenes and confessions of bulimia, angry rants and despairing laments about dieting and the eternal pull of the refrigerator door.