Eat Drink Man Woman


Eat Drink Man Woman is a 1994 comedy-drama film directed by Ang Lee and starring Sihung Lung, Yu-wen Wang, Chien-lien Wu, and Kuei-mei Yang. The film was released on 3 August 1994, and it was both a critical and box office success. In 1994, the film received the Asia Pacific Film Festival Award for Best Film, and in 1995 it received an Academy Award Nomination for Best Foreign Language Film.
The title is a quote from the Book of Rites, one of the Confucian classics, referring to the basic human desires and accepting them as natural. The beginning of the quote reads as follows: “The things which men greatly desire are comprehended in meat and drink and sexual pleasure; ”, Chinese:「飲食男女，人之大欲存焉」.
Many of the cast members had appeared in Ang Lee's previous films. Sihung Lung and Ah Lei Gua played central elderly figures dealing with the transition from tradition to modernity in The Wedding Banquet, in which Winston Chao also starred. Sihung Lung played an immigrant father in Pushing Hands. These three films show the tensions between the generations of a Confucian family, between East and West, and between tradition and modernity. They form what has been called Lee's "Father Knows Best" trilogy. The script was written by Ang Lee, James Schamus and Hui-Ling Wang.

Plot

The setting is 1990s contemporary Taipei, Taiwan. Mr. Chu, a widower who is a master Chinese chef, has three unmarried daughters, each of whom challenges any narrow definition of traditional Chinese culture: Chu Jia-Jen, a school teacher nursing a broken heart who converted to Christianity; Chu Jia-Chien, a fiercely independent airline executive who carries her father's culinary legacy, but never got to pursue that passion; and Chu Jia-Ning, a college student who meets her friend's on-again off-again ex-boyfriend and starts a relationship with him.
Each Sunday Mr. Chu makes a glorious banquet for his daughters, but the dinner table is also the family forum, to which each daughter brings “announcements” as they negotiate the transition from traditional “father knows best” attitudes to a new tradition which encompasses old values in new forms.
As the film progresses, each daughter encounters new men. When these new relationships blossom, their roles are altered and the dynamics within the family change. The father eventually brings the greatest surprise by marrying Liang Jin-Rong.

Cast

Critical response

In her review in The New York Times, Janet Maslin praised Ang Lee as "a warmly engaging storyteller". She wrote, "Wonderfully seductive, and nicely knowing about all of its characters' appetites, Eat Drink Man Woman makes for an uncomplicatedly pleasant experience".
In his review in the Washington Post, Hal Hinson called the film a "beautiful balance of elements... mellow, harmonious and poignantly funny". Hinson concluded:
According to the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, 90% of critics have given the film a positive review based on 48 reviews, with an average rating of 7.56/10. The site's critics consensus reads, "A richly layered look at the complex interactions between a widowed chef and his daughters, Ang Lee's generational comedy Eat Drink Man Woman offers filmgoers a tasty cinematic treat."

Influence

Tortilla Soup, a 2001 American comedy-drama film directed by Maria Ripoll, is based on Eat Drink Man Woman. A sequel, Eat Drink Man Woman 2012 was released, with Jui-Yuan Tsao, producer for the original film, serving as director, and a new set of characters exploring similar themes.

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