At one point in the movie her sons come to the place where she is staying and they're playing cards with her. I didn't get that part. Was that a dream or something? How did her sons know where she was?
shareThat was one of the dream sequences.
shareThat's something called "Magic Realism". In this genre, fiction and reality are mixed at times or always, creating an alternate world where everything might be possible. Magic realism is somewhere between fantasy and surrealism.
Actually sometimes it's hard to distinguish between a surrealist movie and a magic-realist film.
There are plenty of movies that uses "magic realism", the most famous perhaps are:
Like Water for Chocolate (Como agua para chocolate)
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Perfume: The Story of a Murderer
A Walk in the Clouds
Amélie
Kiss of the Spider Woman
Talk to Her (Hable con ella)
Delicatessen
Open Your Eyes (Abre los ojos)
etc.
There are a lot more examples in the cinema of Latin-America and Europe (Mainly southern europe), but since magic realism it's not popular in USA, people over there aren't accustomed to these kind of movies (or novels).
Try reading something by Gabriel García Márquez, Juan Rulfo, Carlos Fuentes, Mario Vargas Llosa, Alejo Carpentier, Arturo Uslar Pietri, Miguel Ángel Asturias, Laura Esquivel, Jorge Amado, etc.
Its not magic realism. It was unequivocally a dream. In magic realism, the magic, the surreal aspect, is integrated in the world in which the characters inhabit. It is part of the reality, whereas in this film it was made plain clear that it was a dream.
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It was indeed one of the dream sequences. Maybe you noticed when Rosalba dropped her glass it fell to pieces without a sound.
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I never make mistakes. Once I thought I did, but I was wrong.