"Eat Drink Man Woman"
                             A film review by
                           Linda Lopez McAlister
                           on "The Women's Show"
                         WMNF-FM (88.5), Tampa, FL
                             September 3, 1994


   There's a new item on the menu of all-time great food films. In addition to
the French cuisine of "Babette's Feast," and the Mexican delicacies of "Like
Water for Chocolate," we now have the Chinese (or, rather, Taiwanese)
equivalent in Ang Lee's new film, "Eat Drink Man Woman" (he's the director who
made "The Wedding Banquet" a couple of years back.

   This is a film about a widowed father and his three adult daughters, but it
happens that the father, Tao Chu (played by Sihung Lung) is Taiwan's greatest
living chef. He's a national treasure in culinary circles who not only rules
over the kitchens of a huge international hotel in Taipei, but seems to spend
most of his time off in the kitchen at home preparing incredible gourmet meals
for the "Sunday dinner tortures" that he insists his daughters attend every
week, though the food goes largely uneaten. The family, as the film opens, is
not exactly a happy place. Generational conflicts and the tensions between
traditional expectations of women and the desires of the three modern young
women in the family are the cause of the various problems.

   The youngest of the sisters, Jia-Ning (played by Yu-Wen Wang), as if to
spite her father for whom fine cuisine is everything, works at a McDonald's.
While hers is the most obvious rebellion against him, she turns out to be, in
many ways, the most traditional of the sisters. The eldest sister, Jia-Jen
(played by Kuei-Mei Yang), in her mid-thirties, is a high school chemistry
teacher and a rather plain, serious convert to Christianity. Because she
claims a chronic broken heart from a youthful romantic disappointment,
everyone simply assumes that she will spend her life living at home, caring
for her father, and that that's what she wants. The middle sister, Jia-Chien
(played by Chien-Lien Wu) is the one who has moved farthest away from the role
of the traditional Chinese woman and the one most like her father (she, too,
could have become a brilliant chef, but is never allowed in the kitchen in in
her father's house). Instead she has become a high-powered executive with an
airline, about to be promoted to vice-president and sent off to Amsterdam.
Since the sisters are not themselves very close to one another, and since they
all have problems with their father's controlling personality, and since he
seems to have lost a good deal of his zest for life (not to mention his sense
of taste), the enforced togehterness of the Sunday dinners is grim and is
punctuated only by a series of explosive pronouncements as one by one the
sisters find ways to break free and find their own lives. There are various
plot twists and turns and surprises. No one really seems in the end to have
been what they seemed or to have wanted what we, and they, thought they
wanted. So in the end, we have a happy ending that has taken everybody in a
different direction than would have been, perhaps, expected at the outset.
This description makes the film seem rather grimmer than it is. In fact, it's
a comedy, with lots of humor and lots of interesting characters including Tao
Chu's old friend and fellow chef "Uncle Wen," the high school volleyball coach
whose shotmaking ability is phenomenal, and Shan-Shan, the little daughter of a
family friend, for whom Tao Chu cooks and delivers gourmet school lunches in exc
hange for her mother's terrible ones which he then eats.

    "Eat Drink Man Woman" is pretty much no-frills filmmaking. Except for
some distorting lenses to depict the hecticness of a big hotel kitchen,
there's nothing fancy in the cinematography or editing or staging of the film.
It's a pleasurable (if perhaps a bit overlong) opportunity to see what
present-day Taiwanese middle-class women's lives are like and to look at some
incredible food. It did leave me, however, with a slight case of indigestion,
for I think, ultimately, it's a film in praise of a set of "family values"
that isn't all that different from the old ones that I and many other feminists
find tough to swallow.

For the WMNF Women's Show this has been Linda Lopez McAlister on Women and
Film.

Linda Lopez McAlister is Professor of Women's Studies and Philosophy at the
University of South Florida.

Copyright 1994 by Linda Lopez McAlister. All rights reserved. Please    do not
reprint this review without the permission of the author.