I Would Like to See It: Eat Drink Man Woman

“Eat, drink, man, woman, food, sex,” says aging chef Old Wen (Jui Wang) to his lifelong friend and fellow chef Lao Zhu (Sihung Lung). “It’s all the same. You can’t separate them.” For Lao, widowed father of three grown daughters all straining toward independence in the bustling world of 1990s Taiwan, the culinary practice which once connected him to his family has become a burdensome obligation and source of friction. His middle daughter Jia-Chien (Chien-Lien Wu), her own culinary ambitions set aside at his request, needles his technique now that his taste buds have begun to fail, and Sunday dinner has become a silent, repressed affair. The Zhus hold together for a complex web of reasons ranging from repression to genuine affection, but the food director Ang Lee shoots with such loving passion — a passion Lao clearly still feels as he guts fish, fries duck, and steams pork shoulder in the sun-drenched warren of his kitchen — is inert once it reaches the table, picked at joylessly and then forgotten.

Lee communicates this complex shift in attitude through lighting, angle, and shot composition. When Lao is cooking we stay mostly at his eye level in sets bathed in natural light, close enough to see the minute changes in his expression — Lung’s face is incredibly mobile, slack in quietly resigned despair one moment, alive with comedic disgust or gentle pleasure the next. Watching him react wordlessly to grade schooler Shan-Shan’s (Yu-Chien Tang) titanic lunch order for herself and her classmates is a whole little drama in and of itself. When Lee is shooting food, he camera moves in closer to focus on ingredients and prep, following the motion of a cut, the rhythm of tenderizing. When we come to the table, the light is artificial, colder, and what looked savory and succulent in close-up seems suddenly impersonal. The vibrant motions of Lao at work give way to listless stillness.

As one by one Lao’s daughters find their own lives and move out of the family home, the film opens up, eschewing conventional storytelling to dwell instead on the quiet and bittersweet good that can come from breaking up a household. Jia-Chien quits her high-powered job and takes over her father’s kitchen. Her sisters find love and marry. The Zhu household is, unquestionably, less close than it was at the film’s start; nor does it seem likely that they will regain that intimacy. The last Sunday dinner we see is held by Jia-Chien and attended only by Lao, who complains she’s used too much ginger in a broth before realizing with wonder that his sense of taste has begun to return. The family in and of itself holds neither joy nor fulfilment, but when its rigid strictures are relaxed, real connection can still bloom, small miracles of human contact opening up an unplumbed world of feeling.