Romancefest 2015: Eat Drink Man Woman

What a beautiful movie! Ang Lee's Taiwanese flick from 1994, EAT DRINK MAN WOMAN, is beautiful not only to look at but also in spirit. This is really a "warm fuzzy" movie, as they used to say in pre-school.

Sihung Lung stars as a widowed father of three daughters, all of whom still live at home. They're all pursuing their individual lives and are getting ever closer to leaving the nest, and the only time they spend together is an elaborate weekly dinner Lung prepares for them.

Much of the movie's magic comes from the close attention paid to the rituals of cooking and eating. Lee's camera lovingly studies every ingredient, every method, every detail of Lung's (and others') complex, beautiful, fragrant, delicious dinners. Lee even captures the beauty and chaos behind the scenes of a giant restaurant kitchen, his camera floating freely amid the confusion.

The oldest daughter (Kuei-Mei Yang) has been single ever since her heart was broken, recently converted to Christianity, and teaches at a school where mysterious love notes have started showing up for her.

The middle daughter (Chien-lien Wu) is a successful executive at an airline who has recently purchased her own apartment and scored a promotion. She's also the only daughter to follow in her father's culinary footsteps, lamenting she was never allowed to cook since her father was always in charge, but that she loved playing in the kitchen when she was a child, and can now whip up a feast rivaling those of her father's when she visits her boyfriend.

The youngest daughter (Yu-Wen Wang) is a college student who works at a Wendy's and strikes up a relationship with her co-workers on-again/off-again boyfriend.

The passage of time is measured in who shows up to dinner, how many, who doesn't. All major family moments happen at the weekly feasts, usually in the form of announcements from the daughters. Dad's not always the most open, but he eventually does open up after a little booze in an amusing scene near the end of the flick.

There are a lot of little things to love about this movie, including a subplot in which Lung goes out of his way to start cooking a multi-course lunch for his elementary-age niece.

EAT DRINK MAN WOMAN does one of my favorite things that great movies do: it pays great attention to detail. This is not a story about the comings and goings in a general family. This is a very specific family, in a very specific place. The setting is vividly drawn through the use of the food, and that alone makes the movie unforgettable.