A Walk in the Clouds: Pumpkin Flower Soup and Chocolate Flan and with Frosted Grapes 🥁 🥁 🥁 🥁

Year Released: 1995
Directed by: Alfonso Arau
Starring: Keanu Reeves, Anthony Quinn, Aitana Sanchez, Giancario Giannini, Debra Messing
(PG-13, 102 minutes)
Genre: Romance

Do films have to be cynical and unhappy? Not hardly. Put away your cares and take “a walk in the clouds.”

Oh, and you’ll have to travel back more than 25 years – when the film was made in 1995 – another half century to the end of World War II, which is the setting.  An era both more tragic and yet simpler, too.

Army sergeant Paul Sutton (Keanu Reeves) returns from the war to San Francisco and the wife he met and married the weekend before shipping out.  More common than we might think, by the way.

The war has changed him; internal scars from that deadly conflict still haunt. Paul Sutton is not the same man now and wants to give up his job as a candy salesman for a new life.

All of which he has expressed in the daily letters he has written to his wife Betty (Debra Messing), who unfortunately has just stashed them away instead of reading them.

We all know this quick marriage is a mistake, but the decent Paul tries to do the right thing and takes a train to Sacramento to reapply for his old dead-end job.

Here is where we must inject Roger Ebert’s take on the film.  He sees it as a sort of litmus test for the audience, giving it his highest rating:

“A Walk in the Clouds is a glorious romantic fantasy, aflame with passion and bittersweet longing. One needs perhaps to have a little of these qualities in one's soul to respond fully to the film, which to a jaundiced eye might look like overworked melodrama, but that to me sang with innocence and trust...At a time when movies seem obligated to be cynical, when it is easier to snicker than to sigh, what a relief this film is.” – Roger Ebert

This romantic soul (Different Drummer) has to agree with Ebert. The younger me rejected sentimental films as below par even if I secretly liked them.  Now I have seen enough sadness in life that I embrace happy endings, innocence, and trust with open arms.

Yes, it is mostly melodrama that follows in our film – a chance meeting with a lovely girl on the train, Victoria Aragon (Aitana Sanchez), heir to a wealthy family that traces its roots to Mexico and Spain before that.

Her aristocratic and traditional family headed by a father who rules the roost and is sure “to kill his daughter if he finds out she is pregnant without a husband.”

The ever decent Paul volunteers to stand in for him in a temporary ill thought out scheme.

Anthony Quinn plays Victoria’s grandfather, the opposite of his son. He is filled with love and acceptance, the kind that orphan Paul has never known.

We have a lot of set pieces, some kind of hooky, like a grape stomping dance with barefoot women smashing grapes in a huge wooden tub. And somehow we forget the whole 3 week fermentation process, and the new wine is ready to taste almost immediately. Just as it was in Kirk Douglas’s Ulysses.

We also have a set of calamities that hit so hard and fast that it takes our breath away, but what anchors the film, which of course audiences loved and so many “critics” loathed, is the innocence and thorough decency of Victoria and Paul.

Each is willing to sacrifice their chance for happiness out of deference for others.  Of course Paul must return to his wife, Victoria tells him, even we all know said wife is a superficial manipulator, not worth the lovely raven hair on Victoria’s head.

We laugh as they rush to cuddle together on the family’s bed when anyone enters their bedroom, Paul quickly returning to his quilt on the floor afterward.

I guess the same critics who complain about toxic masculinity are not too happy when it’s not there.

Enjoy this sweet film with Pumpkin Flower Soup or Chocolate Flan with Frosted Grapes, celebrating Victoria’s family and Paul past job selling chocolates, As well as many other creative and delicious treats.

–Kathy Borich
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