Ang Lee’s classic film, about a retired Taiwanese chef Chu (Sihung Lung) who tries to bond with his three unmarried adult daughters through his love language of food, has an iconic opening scene showing Chu preparing his weekly Sunday family dinner. If that scene is the appetizer, the rest of the film, which deals with intergenerational tensions and tradition vs modernity, continues to be just as satisfying. Eat Drink Man Woman is the last and the best film in Lee’s “Father Knows Best” trilogy. It is also one of the great food movies, and happened to be light years ahead of our current food porn obssessed culture. Lee understood how to capture delicious food on film better than anyone at that time, not only the hi-res shots of the food itself but the movement of the cameras capturing the hustle and bustle of the kitchen.
Each Sunday night, the Chu household gathers for a sumptuous homemade dinner, whose table serves as the family forum and podium for topics ranging from religion to relationships and careers. His three daughters still live at home with him, and each of their relationships with him is complicated, interdependent, and checkered with little resentments that have built up over a lifetime. The three daughters are distinct, fully fleshed out characters with effective introductions and interesting storylines. Jia-Jen (Kuei-Mei Yang), the oldest daughter, is a chemistry schoolteacher and devout Christian convert who is eternally single and known to all the aunties as the “old maid”. The second daughter, Jia-Chien (Chien-Lien Wu), is a successful airline business executive saving up money to move out and buy her own place. Jia-Ning (Yu-Wen Wang), the youngest, is the innocent and cheerful college student and part-time fast food employee who offers moral support to others, particularly a co-worker with relationship troubles.
Each of the Chu family members’ stories take unexpected twists and turns, but they aways intersect at the family dinner table, typically in the form of unexpected “announcements”. Over time, we learn about and empathize with each of the characters. We are granted access to each of their thoughts and feelings. In one scene, they are all quietly eating around the dinner table – no words are spoken, and they are each lost in thought, but the viewer knows exactly what each of them is worried and preoccupied about. In good films, just as in life, there are always multiple sides to a story. As much as the children want independence, the dad is torn as well. He says to his friend in one conversation that he’s tired of his children and can’t wait for them to move out: “it’s like cooking, once you finish making the dish, your appetite is gone” (his friend has an equally great retort that he is “as repressed as a turtle.”). Family is supposed to help and support each other, so why does it always seem to end in fights and misunderstandings?
The themes and conflicts here are universal, but the cultural circumstances feel so specific and authentic. One form of the external social pressures comes from the neighbor auntie who can complain incessantly about her children, foreigners, and in-laws in a single uninterrupted breath. There’s another scene where the dad is doing the laundry and all the bras and women’s clothing get all knotted together – it’s full of these kinds of little touches of real life that movies seem to always forget about. Another is when Jia-Chien sees her father at the hospital. Almost every adult has had that sudden moment of realization – when did my mom/dad get so old?
Relationships change with time, and we see this happen with both sides. The father is only able to show his affection through his food and his daughters no longer seem to be able to receive it that way. One of the most revealing parts of the film occurs when he sees that his neighbor’s daughter does not have homemade lunches for school, and he takes it upon himself to make her school lunches, leading to a “reverse” lunchbox moment. She then becomes so popular that she starts taking daily lunch orders from her classmates. It’s sweet and funny, but you also realize that was probably his daughters’ experience growing up, and he gets to relive their childhood this way. Cooking food and cutting fruit is not just an Asian dad cliche, there is real unironic poignancy behind Chu’s actions.
The way Lee crafts his successive plot twists and reveals leads to a gripping crescendo of a third act, and the viewer’s expectations are subverted over and over again. It is a fun watch. But the even more compelling part is the character work, and the way we start to understand why some of the relationships are the way they are, the same way each layer of an onion is peeled back. If there is one central relationship, it’s between Jia-Chien and her father, but the performances and the writing are so strong that you wish you could see more of all of the other characters as well.
Eat Drink Man Woman (in Chinese, 飲食男女) is also one of the great movie titles. Each word has the plain meaning that makes sense given the story, but together, it makes up a Chinese idiom that refers to the basic human desires in life. Like each member of a family, or the different ingredients in a dish, the sum is greater than its parts. Food and love are the essence of this movie, and they are the essence of life.
