Halle Berry names the one movie that “spoke to my mind”
After moving on from her modelling career, Halle Berry made her movie breakthrough in 1992’s The Boomerang with Eddie Murphy, a performance that led to further appearances in The Flintstones and Bulworth. It wasn’t long before Berry established herself as one of the big players in Hollywood, with roles of notoriety just around the corner.
For her effort in 2001’s Monster’s Ball, Berry won the Academy Award for ‘Best Actress’, making her (to date) the only African-American woman to have been given such recognition. Further acclaimed roles followed in the shape of X-Men, Swordfish and Die Another Day, the latter of which saw her become a Bond girl.
The cinematic medium is important to Berry. In a feature with A-Frame, she explained that she grew up as a “latchkey kid” raised by a single parent, having to spend a lot of time at home alone. That’s why movies played a significant part in her life, and in the same feature, the actor named five films that had the biggest impact on her.
After noting some of the classics such as The Sound of Music, Rocky and Requiem for a Dream, Berry selected her wildcard outside choice, the 1992 Mexican romantic drama film Like Water for Chocolate, directed by Alfonso Arau. There’s a sense of magical realism in Arau’s film, based on the debut novel of the same name by Laura Esquivel.
The film stars Lumi Cazavos as Tita, a young woman living through the early 1900s as she struggled with the ongoing nature of love, family and tradition. That tradition means that Tita cannot marry the man that she truly loves, so she suddenly turns her heartache and attention towards the world of cooking.
“One of my teachers at school told me to watch it,” Berry explained. “I was taking a course in cinema and filmmaking as an elective, and that started my love affair with foreign film.” As with many cinema fans, the first moment of watching movies from another country often has the biggest impact, and this is certainly the case with Berry.
Continuing to explain why the movie had such a deep and impressionable impact on the actor at a young age, Berry noted, “It birthed my ability to fantasize and dream, and I fell in love with this way of filmmaking that was very different from the movies that I had been enjoying at that time. That’s one that just spoke to my mind.”
Check out the trailer for Alfonso Arau’s Like Water for Chocolate below.
