Customer Reviews
Hot Sizzlin' Chef "onTop" in Every Way - By: Erika Borsos, 02 Feb 2008 
Penelope Cruz sizzles in her role as Isabella, a charming & seductive chef in a smalll Brazilian seaside resort callled Bahia. She marries Toninho Oliveira (played by Murilo Benecio) who is a initiallly a waiter & later the owner of the restaurant where she wows the customers with her spicey & delicious original meals. They marry & are ecstaticallly happy ... except there is one problem: Isabella suffers from motion sickness & during their love-making she must be the one on top. This position eventuallly frustrates Toninho who makes one *fatal* mistake - he cheats on his wife, so he can once more be in a more dominant position. She discovers this major indiscretion & leaves him. She pays homage to the goddess of the sea in Bahia before leaving on her trip to the USA. She had received many offers of jobs as a chef in the USA & decided to move to San Francisco ... to try out her luck.
In San Francisco, she manages to find Monica, a childhood friend, who offers her a place to live. Monica it turns out is a cross-dressing male/ a drag queen ... There are flashback scenes to their childhood when growing up & the viewer discovers how Isabella developed her cooking skills & talent. In San Francisco, Isabella goes job hunting & is rejected by one of the 5 star restaurant managers who had given her so much praise when he visited in Bahia. She is however hired by a cooking school & becomes enormously popular. Her class is attended by a huge following & among them is a young television producer who is being pressured to create a new T.V. program for his network. He is enticed by Isabella's beauty & delicious food. He gets a brainstorm of an idea. He sells the network on creating a cooking program which stars Isabella & her hot & spicey creations ... Monica dresses Isabella in some sexy outfits which along with her spectacular dishes from Bahia becomes an instant success.
Meanwhile, Toninho is very lonely in Bahia. He is remorseful & deeply misses Isabella. He makes some offerings to the goddess of the sea , with the hope of reuniting with his wife. He flies to San Francisco then, by pure chance discovers his wife is the major star of a hugely popular TV cooking program. He serenades Isabella with a marvelous Brazilian band ...As luck would have it, she rebuffs his efforts. He pursues her to the studio, & along with the band, ends up providing background music for her program. The network executives consider cutting them out but soon learn, Toninho & the band create more magic & increase the program's ratings ... As executives often do, just when everything is going extremely well, they make an inane decision to change Isabella's cultural approach & tone down her television persona - with the goal of appealing to mainstream America.
It is quite an entertaining adventure to view how this major dilemma is resolved. Also, Cliff, the local TV producer is a rival for Isabella's affections, just when Toninho has resolved to do everything in his power to win back Isabella for himself. This film is pure fantasy & pure entertainment. It is a pleasure to watch. Penelope Cruz sparkles in her role. Murilo Benicio is a joy to view but his character is less well developed which is unusual given his popularity & extraordinairy acting ability. Mark Feurerstein plays a believable TV producer. Harrold Perrineau, Jr is an amusing cross-dressing drag queen & a good friend to Isabella ...Overalll, the film is quite funny & finishes on a positive & satisfying note. Erika Borsos [pepper flower]
a very dishy chef with food almost as tasty - By: dan the fan, 08 Jun 2007 
As a visual spectacle this is a gorgeous movie & the music played throughout it is lively,soft & romantic.The humour is light-hearted
and the story being told is easy to follow.The producers of the film did such a good job making the food look tasty & in presenting the chef,Penelope Cruz, as the main dish that the viewer is left in no doubt that if Cruz started a cookery programme on tv in real life a lot of people would watch it!
However for me Woman On Top lacked in its ability
to make me care about what was happening to the characters being portrayed & so I can only give it three stars.
light, colourful and sexy - By: andybontour@yahoo.com, 13 Aug 2001 an aestheticallly pleasing film with the locations as appealing as Penelope Cruz.
Our heroine (of jamon jamon fame)plays a young brazilian wife who suffers from motion sickness. to avoid being sick she bruises her husband's machismo as she insists on driving & when it comes to sex as per the title its woman on top. The husband's (an antonio banderas lookalike)adultery results in the knee jerk reaction of cruz running away to san francisco & seeing a witchdoctor to rid her of her broken heart.
without spoiling the plot, what follows is a bright, light, delight of a film featuring high camp, brazilian samba, magic & the sexiest scenes with a jalapeno pepper in a cookery programme ever shot.
its not heavy high culture but it is an accessable, fantastic looking romantic comedy & i loved it
