Love is a Language Season: Eat Drink Man Woman (Dir Ang Lee, 2h3m, 1994)

Love and food, as they are everywhere in culture, and in our everyday lives, are entwined. Pulp Fiction has its $5 shake at Jack Rabbit Slims, Tampopo has its memorable egg-yolk scene in a film that lays out a banquet of food and eroticism, I am Love has its prawns, Annie Hall its lobsters, and, of course, Lady and the Tramp has its iconic, oft-imitated spaghetti scene. Food is potent, food is as much a language of love- and indeed, people falling out of love-sample, if you will, Whatever Happened to Baby Jane's rats, or The Public Enemy's infamous grapefruit to see ruined or downright inedible meals as a symbol of two people deeply at odds with each other. What better film to bridge the cultural divide with a meal than Eat Drink Man Woman, Ang Lee's charming romantic comedy in which a father and his three daughters traverse through life together, living, and indeed eating together as they travel very different paths through their careers, and through love.

We begin with the banquet. By 1994, Ang Lee was a major force in Taiwanese cinema. Having cut his teeth on Pushing Hands (1991), showing a nation split between East and West, between the older traditions of the elder generations, and the individuality of the younger, so Lee's second film, The Wedding Banquet (1993) would launch him into the stratosphere. Another romantic comedy, in which a gay Taiwanese man living in Manhattan must find a wife at the behest of his traditionally minded parents, and where Lee begins to explore the blurring of these generational boundaries, Lee won the Golden Bear in Berlin, was nominated for an Oscar and a Golden Globe, and swept the boards at Taiwan's own Golden Horse awards. Lee's course was set.

We begin with the banquet; we see a middle aged man preparing a colossal amount of food, in beautiful delicacy, chopping this and that, making tiny dumplings, braising, boiling all manner of things, peeling vegetables, frying and cutting meat, and gutting and preparing fish and chickens. It is the perfect character introduction to a master chef, and through it, we are introduced to Zhu, (Lung Sihung). There is something beautifully meticulous about the sequence, producing a character out of actions, rather than words (much of this to do with the seamless usage of a chef as a body double), and by its end, we not only feel we know Zhu as a character, a man clearly a master at his craft, from the scores of photographs around the house, but utterly in love with the act of creating these meals, a lifetime of experience poured into these banquets

In sharp relief, however, the film juxtaposes his daughters; his youngest, Jia-Ning (Wang Yu-wen), is a student who works in an American fast food restaurant, where she often has to support her co-worker, whose relationship with her boyfriend has become rocky, whilst her older sisters have to contend with the pressures of work, with eldest sister Jia-Jen (Yang Kuei-mei) working in school as a chemistry teacher, where her faith propels her onward, and middle sister, Jia-Chien (Jacklyn Wu), who works for an airline, and in comparison to her straight laced older sister, is sexually liberated. All three of them, though, remain living under their father's roof, with their communal meals one of the few times they meet as a family; much of the rest of the film bookends its major incidents, its turns and twists in the lives of its three heroines, with these oasises of calm at the dinner table; despite what else happens in the film, here they remain a family.

This intimate family gathering, though, is rudely interrupted. First, Jia-Chien announces she is moving out, and, in a further break from her father, and her sisters, critiques his food, but before their father can respond, Zhu is called into his long time friend's business to save a banquet gone out of control, and we follow him into the bowels of the restaurant in a masterful visual quotation of Scorsese's Goodfellas, where he wastes no time in setting things right, but, relaxing after the banquet with his friend, Old Wen (Veteran Taiwanese actor Wang Jui), he does begin to ponder to what degree his life has become routine empty of his deceased wife, and revolving around food and his daughters, and begins to dote upon a friend of the family, Jin-Rong, and her daughter, Shan-Shan, replacing the girl's meagre meals with his home-cooked delicacies, growing closer to the duo, and the girl's grandmother.

In sharp relief, his daughters enjoy far less serene solutions to their troubles as they, in turn, begin to encounter trials in their lives, largely related to romance. Jia-Jen has to contend with mysterious love letters, that seem to come from the handsome volleyball coach, Ming-Dao, a man that has a mutual interest in her, leading to a revelation that's as gently sweet as it is heartbreaking, before Jia-Jen finds other ways to rekindle their love. It's a series of sequences that further depict a woman attempting to reconcile her interest in men with her faith, with her trips back to the family house punctuated with religious music, but one she is able to eventually balance.

Jia-Ning's narrative thread, in comparison, is perhaps the most straight-forward, of a girl growing into a young woman-her relationship with her friend Rachel's former boyfriend, Guo-Lun is a occasionally sly send-up of pining for unrequitable love-we first see him slouched and reading Dostoevsky, and complaining about his lot-but, as he begins to realise that he is in love with Jia-Ning, so he reveals more about himself, including his love for photography; the solution to Jia-Ning's search for love may be the messiest of the film, and, compared to the rich lives her sisters live, the youngest sister does occasionally feel under-developed, but as she too comes into balance between the two poles of "eat, drink" and "man woman", so the family begins to come back into equilibrium, in a new, and charming way.

But undeniably, the weight of the narrative remains on the shoulders of Jia-Chien and her father-even if the film were to strip away the other members of the household, the imbalance, the sense of the family being restricted by their roles, is put into motion by Jia-Chien, and it is she that restores it. Her tale, though, is a roller-coaster of superb moments against the background of 90s Taiwan, from finding the apartment she has heavily invested in is, in fact, nothing more than a front company and a now-abandoned building site, to the aggressive expansionism of her airline company, that brings her face to face with Li Kai (Winston Chao, the star of After the Wedding), and into a romance that seems to put her onto the same trajectory as her sisters, only for Lee to wrong-foot us once again.

Against Jia-Chien, though, the film presents its greatest love-story, that of Jia-Chien for her father. We see them drift apart, the increasing pressures of her job, her moving away from the family home, and her romantic involvement with Li-Kai are tempered with the increasingly frail state of her father, a man that has not only lost his wife, but now loses his sense of taste, and one of his closest friends, seen going to the doctor's by Jia-Chien, and thus worrying her as to whether the figure who holds the family together is dying. However, it is their reconciliation, and the unexpected direction in which Zhu's own love life develops that acts as the glue that brings the family back together, not as a recreation of the inhibited family as they were before, but as a communal group of people who now have both their culnery and romantic needs met.

In hindsight, Eat Drink Man Woman may be best remembered as Lee's final film before launching himself into Hollywood with the finest Austen adaption ever made, 1995's Sense and Sensibility, but it is so much more than that, a beautifully made banquet of a film, in which the director explores love and desire with charm and care, in a film that is as beautiful, and ultimately nourishing as the meals that pepper it..

Rating: Highly Recommended

Our final stop for Love is a Language season will be Japan, as we discuss Studio Ghibli's charming Whisper of the Heart. Why not start 2023 with a new resolution, by subscribing to my Patreon from just £1/$1.00 (ish) a month? https://www.patreon.com/AFootandAHalfPerSecond