TIFF '23: Getting into the Christmas Spirit with ‘El Sabor de la Navidad’

By Abe Friedtanzer

It always feels a little strange to watch a Christmas movie long before the holiday season, but that just means getting into that wintry mindset ahead of time! El Sabor de la Navidad, a Spanish-language comedy from Mexico, is notable because it’s produced by Salma Hayek Pinault and stars Mariana Treviño, who is the best reason to watch last year’s A Man Called Otto. It’s a lighthearted portrait of an extended family and others connected to them trying to get through a holiday that brings far too many conflicting personalities together…

Treviño stars as Valeria, a renowned chef who reluctantly takes on an assistant, Gerardo (Andrés Almeida), to help her prepare the many meals she has been hired to cook for Christmas. Valeria is reserved and doesn’t seem eager to connect with other people, while Gerardo expresses tremendous curiosity about and admiration for her recipes, as well as a certain attraction to a woman who clearly doesn’t take much time to focus on her personal life. As they prep and slowly connect, one of Valeria’s clients comes into focus, as a child comes home for the first time after making a major transition, and, in another arc, two lifelong friends don’t see eye-to-eye as they dress up as Santa Claus and try to attract customers for photo opps.

Courtesy of TIFF

The best point of comparison for this film is Love Actually, in that there is some drama embedded underneath all the surface-level humor as well as an abundance of characters filling just one movie. There’s also evidently a great deal of history to everything, particularly the family in which adult siblings have their own issues with their mother and her approval. It all comes to a boiling point, of course. Predictably, things get less serious as the plot takes wild turns designed to best manufacture and extract heartfelt moments of true connection.

Courtesy of TIFF

The title of the film recommends its content well, referencing the flavor of Christmas, and this film feels like a perfect fit for its future (November) home, which is the streaming service ViX. While it may not be all that memorable or groundbreaking, it’s a film that, in just one hundred minutes, manages to cover a lot of ground. It’s just the kind of fare that people seem to want around the holidays, mirroring an exaggerated version of real life where people always manage to resolve their differences and solve their problems, if only for a few hours at Christmastime. B

El Sabor de la Navidad makes its world premiere in the Special Presentation section at TIFF.