“Eat Drink Man Woman” opens with a whiz-bang montage sequence of a cook preparing a lavish meal: it’s the culinary counterpart of an action sequence as he slices, spices, dices, steams and sizzles, executes a chicken, and inflates a duck with frenetic precision. He’s Mr. Chu, the foremost chef in Taipei, making the regular Sunday dinner for his three daughters. The irony is that Chu has lost his taste buds. This is Lee’s metaphor for the erosion of tradition and rituals in modern Taiwan. The Sunday dinners are no fun for Chu, a widower, or his daughters, who have so many problems they barely touch their Lotus Flower soup.
Jia-Jen, the oldest, is a schoolteacher whose pupils make fun of her as an old maid. Jia-Ning, the youngest, works in an American-type fast-food restaurant, a stir-fried symbol if there ever was one. Jia-Chien, the middle sister, is an airline executive and a frustrated chef herself who is a severe critic of her father’s cuisine. Meanwhile other appetites boil up as the three young women get into various romantic entanglements. Old Chu himself investigates recipes for foods designed to stimulate the sexual function.
Things work out, with some clever twists, as they should in a savory soup opera. The screenplay, by Lee, Taiwanese writer Hui-Ling Wang and the American James Schamus, is something of a multicultural feat. In an introduction to the published script Schamus tells how Lee complained that the characters’ psychology wasn’t Chinese enough. Schamus gave up and wrote the scenes as Jewish as he could make them. “Ah ha,” said Lee, reading the new scenes. “Very Chinese!” What the movie is is very human, especially in the appealing actors, notably Sihung Lung as Chu and the stunningly beautiful Chien-Lien Wu as Jia-Chien. If Ang Lee sometimes piles on the sugar, he has made a truly sweet movie in a bitter time. It leaves a bracing aftertaste.
