Catch-up cinema: Eat Drink Man Woman

The film (500) Days of Summer (2009) took great pride in its unconventional story, saying “This is not a love story. This is a story about love.” In the same manner, Eat Drink Man Woman (1994) isn’t a family film. It’s a film about family.

Synopsis

When we think of family films, we usually think of messed-up events leading to happy endings, of squabbling siblings all coming together, and of an ending that involves a big banquet scene where everyone celebrates their newfound appreciation and love for each other. Can you find these in Eat Drink Man Woman? The answer is both a yes and no.

While Ang Lee’s Taiwanese drama shows elements of the family film, it also upends many of the genre’s clichés. Take for example how family dinner scenes are often used in more traditional family films as means of expressing togetherness. Eat Drink Man Woman begins by colorfully detailing the elaborate preparation of a feast – meaty dumplings, deeply colored soup, and fresh game and seafood being prepared rather noisily in a cozy kitchen – but the actual dinner is awkward and silent. The set itself makes use of dull, graying colors and is lit harshly for a very heavy mood. This is only the first of the many surprises the film has in store for its viewers, least of which are the absolutely crazy romantic exploits of each main character.

These little “romances” are the backbone of the film because it is through telling the stories of each character that the story of the family comes together. Old Man Chu’s daughters each have lives of their own, but all live under the same roof with their father – a setup not uncommon in Asian families – and a lot of crossover happens between their family life and their doings outside the house. We meet the characters having different personas at home and away from it – the most notable example being the second daughter Jia-Chien – but as the film progresses, the viewer is led to realize that one’s life cannot be compartmentalized: life is the sum of all its parts.

You Should Watch This Film If

You’re interested in what Ang Lee’s films were like before he went to Hollywood.
You like Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and you want to see how Ang Lee fares with “regular people."
You don’t like Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon since you prefer films about “regular people.”
You like bittersweet family stories.
You’re young. The generation gap theme will appeal to you.
You’re old. The generation gap theme will appeal to you as well.
You like food and/or cooking – lots of gorgeous food in this film!

Spoileriffic Review

What is common to Ang Lee’s most popular and successful works Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000), Brokeback Mountain (2005), and Sense and Sensibility (1995) is a willingness to explore the personalities of its characters. Much emphasis is placed on the details, the little habits, and the daily routine such that the audience comes to know the characters. As opposed to simply placing the characters in “emotional” situations to elicit a reaction from the viewers, Ang Lee’s films make his viewers understand how and why these situations become emotional. And because we understand the motives and desires of the characters, even simple expository scenes are rich with emotion.

Eat Drink Man Woman likewise feels like a case study. Instead of presenting an actual physical villain, the film simply follows the characters and the way their lives unfold. The beauty of this film is in its complexity. While each character starts out slightly predictable – Jia-Jen is a pious old maid, Jia-Chien is a liberal career woman, Jia-Ning is the baby with a seemingly harmless crush, and Old Man Chu is the perfect grandpa – they each break free from these boxes over the course of the film. Jia-Ning is the first to make a shocking announcement, while Jia-Jen is perhaps not as pious as she seems, and Jia-Chien ends up taking on (and enjoying) the role from which she tried so hard to get away in the beginning. The biggest surprise of all is Old Man Chu’s own May-December romantic entanglement revealed towards the end of the film.

The main conflict in Eat Drink Man Woman is the pull between two forces in your life. It is manifested as the generation gap between Old Man Chu and his daughters, and within the characters themselves as a form of internal conflict. The film also explores the tension between modernity and a traditional way of life. For example, the Chu family structure is very Asian – three adult daughters still living with their father would definitely seem strange to Western countries – but each individual deals with rather modern problems. In this film, nobody acts as the norms dictate, yet nobody talks about it to keep up the pretense of adhering to the traditional values. This is the cause of the frustration among the characters, and while this repression is commonly associated with Asian societies, it’s a problem I’m sure is common to families everywhere.

In an early scene of Eat Drink Man Woman, Old Man Chu says the basic desires of a person are “Eat, Drink, Man, Woman … can’t avoid them.” You should notice how all four are mentioned without any rank, as if all are on equal footing. Perhaps this means physical needs are as important as the abstract needs, but the more I think about it, the more the line between “physical” and “abstract” becomes blurred. It seems easy to say that eating and drinking is physical and the bond between people is abstract; the truth is that, like the film, things in the real world are harder to classify. Lines are not so easily drawn. Good food can be a source of both physical and emotional satisfaction, and the same can be said about people and relationships.

Eat Drink Man Woman’s final scene, I believe, is the best representation of what the film is all about. After all the craziness, Jia-Chien cooks the traditional family dinner. However, due to the changes in everyone’s lives, only her father is able to come. In this moment, it all comes full circle – the most headstrong daughter prepares a meal for the father who wouldn’t let her in the kitchen, and the meal at the near-empty table proves to be more emotional and meaningful than any of the grand family gatherings previously shown in the film. The ending is far from neat, and their lives are still very complicated, but there is closure in knowing Old Man Chu can taste again – a metaphor for being able to “taste” life again – and in seeing the father and daughter understand each other for the first time in a long time.

It’s a poignant moment that ends the film on an optimistic note and speaks a simple message about the complexity of familial bonds: We may not be perfect, but perhaps we don’t have to be to find peace.

Photo: “Wedding banquet, Victoria Chinese Restaurant” by A. Lau, c/o Flickr. Some Rights Reserved.

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