August 3rd, 1994

Here’s a rare experience: I went 30 years of knowing the title EAT DRINK MAN WOMAN without even knowing exactly what the movie was about. As much as I love several of Ang Lee’s films I never went back and watched the ones that made him so well known. This is his third movie, after the international success of THE WEDDING BANQUET, but before his Hollywood breakthrough SENSE AND SENSIBILITY. To date it’s his only movie set in Taiwan, where he was born and raised.

It’s about three adult sisters and their widower father, an aging master chef who’s losing his sense of taste. And like so many of Lee’s films it’s about complicated family relationships, repressed emotions, secrets and longing.

Also it’s about cooking. It starts with Master Chu (Lung Sihung, EIGHT HUNDRED HEROES) preparing a complex meal for the family. Lots of meat (some of which we first see as live animals) but even for me it’s a beautiful sequence, the precision and ease with which he slices open a fish or dices an onion with his hatchet, the many items he drops into and lifts out of hot oils, the sauces he pours onto them, the delicate ways he folds together dumplings. They’re meticulous processes he must’ve performed hundreds or thousands of times over, all ingrained in his head and muscle memory. The sequence took more than a week to film, with the actor doubled by a real master chef, and it’s several minutes with no dialogue, just some traditional music (composer: Mader, IN THE SOUP) and the pleasing sounds of chopping, sizzling, pouring. He’s in the zone, and he’s at home, all alone, it’s not one of those stressful restaurant settings. It seems so peaceful. It’s for the love of it.

So it’s jarring when it cuts to his daughters at their jobs in the city. The youngest, Jia-Ning (Wang Yu-wen, REBELS OF THE NEON GOD), works at a busy Wendy’s. I love that contrast.

They all live together and he makes a big meal for them every Sunday. The oldest, Jia-Jen (Yang Kuei-mei, later in THE HOLE) is a chemistry teacher who has been single, uptight and Christian since a traumatic breakup after college. Second oldest Jia-Chien is kind of the opposite, she’s still friends (and sex partners) with her ex-boyfriend Raymond (Lester Chit-Man Chan) and likes it much better that way. One of the most heartbreaking moments in the movie is when he tells her he’s getting married – the abrupt end of their casual arrangement may be more crushing than if they’d been committed and he cheated on her.

Jia-Chien also loves to cook and is very good at it but can’t do it in Dad’s kitchen because “I’d be stealing his thunder.” She resents her dad for pushing her out of cooking, even though she’s very successful as an executive at an airline. It’s beautiful to see how much joy she gets presenting her dishes to Raymond.

Jia-Ning (Wang Yu-wen, REBELS OF THE NEON GOD)’s subplot is about screwing over her Wendy’s co-worker Rachel (Yu Chen) by convincing her to play hard-to-get with her sometime boyfriend Guo Lun (Chen Chao-jung, YEAR OF THE DRAGON) and then hanging out with him instead. Not a mature love life, but you gotta start somewhere I guess.

At dinner their dad seems like he has something to get off his chest. He starts to say something about “the last few days,” but he’s interrupted by Jia-Chen making a face tasting his soup. She says the ham is oversmoked. Then she interrupts again saying she has an announcement: she invested in a luxury apartment and will move out when it’s finished. There’s tension about whether she’s leaving the other two alone to take care of Dad, but he says he supports it. Before he can get back to what he wanted to say, he gets a phone call and has to run off. Throughout the movie each of the family members will make at least one announcement at the table, while Chu will keep failing to make his.

The phone call was from his longtime colleague Old Wen (Wang Jui, A TOUCH OF ZEN), who summons him to some huge hotel or casino or something, and there’s a great sequence following him through the building and labyrinthine kitchen, being nodded to or welcomed with great affection and respect. It turns out the shark fins are falling apart in the soup meant for the final course of an important banquet, and Chu is the pinch hitter or Winston the Wolf you call in for an emergency like that. He knows just what to do.

Most of his days are more humble. His neighbor Jin-Rong (Sylvia Chang, ACES GO PLACES) is going through a divorce, and when he finds out her six year old daughter Shan-Shan (Tang Yu-Chien) doesn’t like her school lunches he starts secretly cooking multi-course meals and bringing them for her. Lucky kid. And she gets greedy and starts making him long lists of requests from all her classmates.

Old Wen is a really lovable character too. Since Chu’s tastebuds aren’t what they used to be he has Old Wen taste his food and says he can tell by the look on his face if it’s right or not. Jia-Jen calls Old Wen Uncle; he taught her to cook but tries to calm her anger at her father for discouraging her.

Each member of the family falls in love during the movie, makes major life decisions because of it, and worries about what the others will think. As stressful as living together can be, they also love each other, and what they have together. They’re bad at sharing emotions, good at sharing food. When the sisters are annoyed by neighbors doing karaoke, one of them says, “We communicate by eating. They do it by singing.” But I’d say the food isn’t communicating enough. It’s only when they start following their desires and being honest to each other about it that seem headed for happiness. And the family is strongest when Chu and Jia-Chien can finally set grudges aside and cook together.

I’m very interested in the Spike Lee/Ang Lee connection. Though Ang grew up in Taiwan, he went to college at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and then NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, where he was assistant director on Spike’s master’s degree thesis film, Joe’s Bed-Stuy Barbershop: We Cut Heads. But Spike’s career got rolling faster – in the summer of ’94 he had his seventh film, CROOKLYN, while this was Ang’s third. But both are clearly very personal stories drawing on their famillies (Spike’s much more directly).

Like THE WEDDING BANQUET before it, EAT DRINK MAN WOMAN was nominated for the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film. This was the year David Letterman hosted, and it was widely declared a fiasco, but to me at the time it seemed like the first actually funny Oscars. Anyway, he had a line about EAT DRINK MAN WOMAN being “also how Arnold Schwarzenegger asked Maria Shriver out on their first date.” I don’t know if that supports my side of the argument or not.

It was also nominated for 3 Golden Horse Awards, a Golden Globe, a BAFTA, and six Independent Spirit Awards, and was 1994’s highest grossing foreign language film in the United States and Canada. People made a pretty big deal about it, I’m 30 years behind. So it’s hardly breaking news how good it is. I’m a genre man, I love variations on a formula, but sometimes it’s such a thrill to see something so absorbing that doesn’t need as noticeable of a structure or formula, just a set of characters and their lives to drop you into and by the end you don’t want to leave.

Good job, Ang Lee. You can do anything. I’m still waiting for RACCOON HAMLET.

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pop culture references:

Jia-Ning wears a t-shirt for the band The Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black (whos insignia is a bat symbol with boobs).

She also has a MY NEIGHBOR TOTORO poster and stuffed animal in her room.

There’s a scene in a toy store where they walk through an aisle full of Disney and Ghibli plushies, and Jia-Chen picks up a purple doll she’s told is a popular American character called “Harvey.” I believe that’s a copyright-safe alternative to Barney the purple dinosaur, who we just saw directly referenced in IT COULD HAPPEN TO YOU.

legacy:

EAT DRINK MAN WOMAN was remade in 2001 as TORTILLA SOUP, about a Mexican-American family in an L.A. suburb, and remaqueled in 2012 as A JOYFUL REUNION, set in mainland China. In 2019 it was adapted as a live stage musical at Taiwan’s National Kaohsiung Center for the Arts. It apparently was only performed three times, but from what I can tell that was the intention and not a sign that it was a flop like Carrie: The Musical or something.