Celebrating its 20th anniversary this year, the comedy-drama Tortilla Soup is an underappreciated Latino film, probably because Real Women Have Curves came out a year later.
Whatever the reason it didn’t get as much attention, Tortilla Soup is a funny and heartfelt movie based on Ang Lee’s 1994 Chinese film Eat Drink Man Woman.
In Tortilla Soup, a Mexican American chef named Martin Naranjo (Héctor Elizondo) has lost his sense of smell and taste since becoming a widower.
He shares his home with his three adult daughters. The youngest is Maribel (Tamara Mello), who’s moving too quickly into a new relationship; Carmen (Jacqueline Obradors), who shares her father’s passion for cooking; and Leticia (the late Elizabeth Peña), a high school chemistry teacher who has a crush on the school’s baseball coach Orlando (Paul Rodriguez).
The film also stars Raquel Welch and Constance Marie.
During a recent interview with the Current, Rodriguez said he fondly remembers a scene he shared with Welch during production. “When I was a kid, I had a poster of her in my room that helped me through puberty,” he said. “She is a beautiful lady.”
Free, 7 p.m. Saturday, Nov. 20, Mission Marquee Plaza, 3100 Roosevelt Ave., (210) 212-9373, slabcinema.com.
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This article appears in Nov 17-29, 2021.