Cinema: Justin Pearce
It is irksome to use words like “charming” when describing a film — but in the case of Eat Drink Man Woman no other adjective quite suffices to sum up a movie which is at once so seductive and so hollow.
As the yin-yang oppositions of its title suggest, this film by Taiwanese director Ang Lee is about food and romance. The food is great — the love, well, tainted. Eat Drink Man Woman starts with an alchemic sequence in which master chef Mr Chu takes live fish, fowl and frogs and turns them into a feast worthy of a coffee- table cookery book.
Food is a point of reference and stability for a family who specialise in dysfunctional relationships. One of the daughters, plagued by the bland karaoke music coming from next door, gets philosophical about the fact that other people regard singing in the same way that the family regards food, as a means of recreation and self-expression.
Food provides a focus for Chu’s parental control over his daughters, a control that is matriarchal as much as patriarchal. There’s a neat little inversion of conventional gender roles when we go from the opening scenes of the (male) chef at work in the kitchen, to his daughter, the grey-suited company executive frowning over her office computer — the implication is that these are characters striving to be complete in themselves, beyond the inevitable pairing off which the plot nevertheless seems to demand. But however gorgeous the food may be, these people never quite achieve the level of insight expressed in Eating, Henry Jaglom’s meditation on food and sex in which a woman declares: “I never met a man who could turn me on as much as a baked potato.”
So all the beautiful seasoning that comes with the food fails to disguise a lingering aftertaste of soap — the consequence of the romance part which is presented as a way in which the characters can liberate themselves from their regime of cooking, eating and working. The subtitles have something to do with it: where Ang Lee’s The Wedding Banquet, filmed in English, had a script that gave poignancy to an essentially frothy movie, in Eat Drink Man Woman the banality of it all comes shining through in the words which, printed on the screen, appear one step away from the characters who utter them.
And while drama on this level may be fine in half-hour doses on CCV, it becomes tedious in a film that thrashes around for as long as this one does.