Spotlight

Spotlight Date: 22-June-03
Spoiler Rating: Low

Eat Drink Man Woman (1994)

There's a scene in "Eat Drink Man Woman" when a retired chef responds to an urgent call from his old workplace and arrives in the nick of time to turn a disastrous seafood dinner into a gourmet work of art. Striding through the kitchen amid a flurry of anxious cooks, he quickly assesses the state of the ingredients believed to be a bust and sees in them a potential that others did not. This little episode illustrates the main idea behind the movie's simple tale of food and family: that while one may define and pursue the elements of success, one should remain open and flexible enough to discover unexpected satisfaction when things don't work out as planned.

"Eat Drink Man Woman" (which helped put director Ang Lee on the menu) is the story of a modern Taiwanese family consisting of a father, Mr. Chu (Sihung Lung), and his three adult daughters, all of whom live in a beautiful old house in a state of strained cordiality. Mr. Chu, the master chef, is a fairly traditional fellow who is determined to provide a good home for his children until they marry and leave, but wishes they would hurry up and get it over with. (Kids are like cooking, he says: your appetite is gone when the dish is done.) His eldest daughter (Kuei-Mei Yang) is courting spinsterhood at age 30 and has turned to Jesus Christ to help her with her burden of loneliness. His youngest (Yu-Wen Wang) is a lighthearted college student who works at Wendy's and is not altogether schooled in the ways of the world. And his middle child, Jia-Chien (Chien-lien Wu), is a driven beauty with a temperament most like his own --- and is, therefore, the one he struggles with most and the focal point of the story.

Jia-Chien, at the insistence of her father, abandoned her own cooking talents years ago and instead began climbing the corporate ladder. At the beginning of the movie, she appears to be a somewhat shallow, ambitious person, with her mini-skirted power suits, made-to-order condo, corner office, and handsome, no-strings-attached lover. Of all Chu's daughters, she is the one everyone expects to fly the coop first, and indeed she is eager to do so. But as the story unfolds, she is shown to have desires and depths that even she had not realized, or had forgotten. As one by one the building blocks of her carefully scripted life fall away, and as the members of her family make surprising decisions and announcements, Jia-Chien finds that the things she thought she wanted to escape are the very things she really needs. Although the movie details the growth and fate of each member of the family, it is Jia-Chien who watches them all and learns the most from what she sees.

"Eat Drink Man Woman" is a warm-hearted movie that unfolds unhurriedly and never feels strident in its triumphs and heartbreaks. Like all films that associate food with life, it contains a lot of mouth-watering scenes in the kitchen and at the dinner table (and, best of all, in a school cafeteria, where a little girl shares Mr. Chu's fabulous lunches with her envious classmates). In addition, there is a good bit of humor to spice up the story, usually involving an amusingly obnoxious widow with designs on the old chef, and some touching scenes of affection, most notably between Chu and his best friend from the restaurant (Jui Wang). Altogether, "Eat Drink Man Woman" doesn't break any new ground or shed any new light on the dynamics of men and women, fathers and daughters, or the roots of happiness to be discovered at home, but it's a well told tale that leaves a sweet and pleasant aftertaste.

Copyright © 2003 The Jujube (M. I. Kim). All rights reserved.