A Walk in the Clouds

(Alfonso Arau, USA, 1995)

For his first American project after the huge, international success of Like Water for Chocolate (1992), director Alfonso Arau has abandoned the ingredients of magic and melodrama that made his first film a hit. A Walk in the Clouds is a very plain, old-fashioned love story.

In fact, it could almost be a film from the immediate post-war period in which it is set. Paul (Keanu Reeves), a soldier returning from the traumas of battle, meets the pregnant, unmarried Victoria (Aitana Sánchez-Gijón) on a bus trip. Paul has already been disenchanted by the realisation that his wife is a bimbo who did not even bother reading his daily letters from the frontline. But Victoria is different – she is virtually an angel.

Paul faces the prospect of his soul-destroying job – as a chocolate salesman! – and Victoria dreads confronting her upright, Mexican-American family with the evidence of her reckless indiscretion. So they join forces and pretend to be wed in order to protect everyone's honour. Scenes of these two gorgeous creatures chastely sharing a marital bed have less sizzle than when Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert tensely shared the same room in It Happened One Night (1934).

A Walk in the Clouds makes you realise just how good Clint Eastwood's film of The Bridges of Madison County (1995) is. For Arau's film is neither an intense romantic drama nor a frothy romantic comedy, even though it liberally borrows moods and plot devices from both traditions. Keanu Reeves, always wooden in straight dramatic parts, lets the show down – except for one magical moment when Anthony Quinn appears to ad lib a genuine, spontaneous emotion out of him.

In terms of the current vogue for depicting a multicultural, melting pot America, this film is a real curiosity. The lush farming valley (known as "the clouds") in which the main action is set is like a Mexican migrant enclave, a magical island cut off from the mainstream of American life. In this charmed world, the male elders of the clan (played by Giancarlo Giannini and Quinn) enact their timeless, patriarchal dramas, while the "earth mothers" smile wisely and lustily.

Much of the film's evocation of this world will seem fantastically corny to most viewers (including me). But inside this nostalgic dream of community Arau fashions his best scenes: pantheistic visions conjuring a veritable nature cult, where singing, dancing, drinking and sex flow organically from the harvesting of the land.

© Adrian Martin October 1995