View all Reviews by Bobo Deng

Eat Drink Man Woman – Ang Lee

Ang Lee is undoubtedly the most well-known Taiwanese director of the moment.  With huge Oscar-winning films under his belt like Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Brokeback Mountain, Lee proves that he is capable of making excellent films of any genre.  Even before the successful Hollywood blockbusters, he made some beautiful films that are worth watching; if only for their beautiful presentation.  One such film is Eat Drink Man Woman, at the same time a tribute to Chinese cuisine and an unconventional bildungsroman of a traditional Taiwanese family.

Eat Drink Man Woman is definitely not a film to be watched on an empty stomach.  The first few minutes of the film causes sensory overload, as you can almost taste and smell all the delicious food being prepared in the magnificent traditional kitchen.  Food plays such and important role in the film.  It personifies a father’s love for his daughters, contrasted with their modern on-the-go attitude towards eating.  Chu is a master chef who has a hard time adjusting to the pace of retired life.  He lives with his three grown-up daughters, each one representing a different type of woman in modern Taiwanese society.  The oldest is a extremely Christian heartbroken spinster who teaches at the local school; the middle daughter is the power suit-wearing female executive whose work overrides her need for relationships; and the youngest is just becoming a woman, dealing with her first real romance.  Though the film as a whole is fragmented, the individual subplots come together at the family’s Sunday meal.  The daughters eat the carefully prepared food with scowls on their faces, as if rejecting the love that the father puts into preparing the exquisite dishes.  As the film rolls on, the viewers get a sense of the daughter-father rift.  Slowly losing his sense of taste, Chu appears to put a lot of effort into his meals, but in fact just goes through the motions; the daughters humor their father in eating the meals, but do not enjoy the food at all.

 The personalities of each character is signified by the food they eat or prepare.  The father cooks visually attractive food, but it is tasteless, reflecting his loss of interest in life caused by mourning his wife.  In contrast to their father’s time-consuming cooking, his daughters are impulsive; preferring to work at a fast food joint, they make unexpected announcements about eloping and moving out.  The daughter’s friend is a horrible cook, reflecting her broken life, having recently divorced her husband.  Eventually, the story of the middle daughter comes front and center; she is the modern woman, who appears to be strongly anti-tradition.  Her defiance seems to be the strongest at first, with her announcement of moving out.  With time, and through food, we discover that she is in fact the most grounded in tradition.  She used to have dreams of becoming a chef like her father, but the memory of those aspirations are faint.  She remembers learning how to cook with the old masters as a child, returns to cooking away from the knowledge of her father at her ex-boyfriend’s house, and is the torch bearer for the Sunday meal tradition.  It takes the whole film and many meals for her to find who she really is.  Along the way, the awkward announcements at their weekly dinner further the plot along.