A Walk in the Clouds

Watching Arau's follow-up to Like Water for Chocolate is like finding yourself in Shangri-La, a lost valley where time has stood still for decades, and movies still end with 'The End'. Reeves is Paul Sutton, a GI recently returned from WWII. He has a wife who doesn't love him, nightmares from the front (dream sequences by Alejandro Jodorowsky), a two-bit job as a travelling chocolate salesman, and no prospects. A chance encounter with Victoria Aragon (Sanchez-Gijon) changes all that. She's on her way home to face the music: pregnant, alone, and terrified of her father (Giannini), who oversees the family vineyard in Southern California. Paul agrees to play her husband and then disappear into the night, but he's waylaid by what he finds there, and the kindly efforts of the elderly Don Pedro (Quinn). This is shameless stuff: happy, barefoot peasants sing that traditional Latin cancion, 'Crush the grapes, crush the grapes,' the moonlight is so strong you could get burned, and the metaphors are writ large as tabloid headlines; it's all about putting down roots. See it, if you must, for Keanu's pure puppy-love, and for a peerless drunken duet with Quinn.