Andrew McMurtryREVIEW: Eat, Drink, Man, Woman (1994)
December 1st 2008 12:38
“Eat, Drink, Man, Woman” is an interesting film with great values and strong morals. The idea of this film is to show the family gathering to eat together every night. No matter what they are doing, they have to be home to eat with one another. This is trying to bring the family closer, but instead it is where they drift apart. Chu (Sihung Lung) says “I hope they all move out, so I can have a quiet life.” when talking about his daughters, but really this is the opposite of what he wants. He loves his daughters and loves having them around but cannot express his feelings to them. He likes feeling needed. This is why he has complete control of the kitchen. The attempt at eating together every night begins to seem useless, especially when the daughters can only annouce anything to the family at the kitchen table. But in the end you see that it is the one thing that brings them together.
This is really a story about love and family and togetherness as well as relationships. The fact is they come together because of food. Food is the universal thing to bring people together. But after dinner, Chu seems to always disappear, leaving the sisters to talk, which generally ends in argument. Ang Lee uses great camera angles, using zoom and the slow pan very well together to show the cooking of the food by Chu as well as the expression in the relationships between the sister and their respective love interests. The movie tells of the familial relationships which go off in four tangents, and lead to Jia-Ning, Jia-Jen and Chu all living their lives and being away from each other with not even the lure of the family dinner to bring them back. This is interesting as the relationship between Jia-Chien and Chu seems to be the most strained, and yet they are the only ones who make time for each other when it comes to the end of the movie.
“Eat, drink, man, woman. Basic human desires. Can't avoid them. All my life, that's all I've ever done. It pisses me off. Is that all there is to life?” This is essentially the idea behind the movie. The relationships formed with the necessities in life are what drive humans. But is that all there is to life? Is there nothing else to look forward to or are we just here to satisfy these base needs? The love I spoke about earlier is a love that Mr Chu finds hard to show to his daughters. During their dinners, tensions run high, but they still see it necessary to be there for each other.
"Eat, Drink, Man, Woman" is a good film. Arthouse films deserve the spotlight more than they recieve. This is a good foreign film without gunfights and explosions and any of that stuff. It just examines the life of a family and what brings them together. It really is good to look into the lives of other people and another to see the disfunction that keeps the family together yet drives them apart. It is a really good movie with good interesting plot twists. I would recommend this film. I'd give it 3.5 out of 5.
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Still, the opening scenes of the father cooking are some of the best that capture the taste and texture of food...