Review of Eat Drink Man Woman (1994) by Cj C — 16 Jun 2008

When the movie begins, I don't think any of us would predict the lives that these people would eventually follow. Indeed, it would seem obvious that some of them would continue in the same life essentially forever, and that is not what happens here. However, each step of the path of each character is believable. Completely. Even the shocking bits make sense in context. This is the story of real people, something you don't always get in movies.

[i]Yin shi nan nu[/i] is the story of the Chu family--the widower Chu (Sihung Lung) and his three daughters. The eldest, Jia-Jen (Kuei-Mei Yang), had one failed love affair in college and has had no romance since. She is a teacher--quiet and deeply Christian. She became more of a mother than a sister to the other two after their actual mother died. Jia-Chen (Chien-lien Wu) is the only one who shares her father's deep and abiding love of cooking, but at her father's instructions, she went to college anyway. She is a rising executive in an airline, and she works harder than she seems to want to. The youngest, Jia-Ning (Yu-Wen Wang), seems rudderless. She works with food, too--she's a cashier at Wendy's. She starts to get involved with her friend's ex (she thinks!) boyfriend.

The great tragedy of the story is that Chu is losing his sense of taste. This is a man who has made food his life. He is a great chef in a culture that reveres great chefs. He works in a hotel kitchen in a region where the best food is in hotel restaurants. He is a great, great chef--and there is only so long that he would be able to continue. Jia-Chen could have taken his place had he let her do what she once loved--what she still loves, for all that--but he shut her out of that world by trying to get something else for her, something that he thought was better for her.

Isn't that the way, though? We cannot choose for those we love. They have to choose for themselves. If we try, we can often make things worse. Further, we cannot see where any one choice will lead. Neither Chu nor Jia-Chen could know that sending her to college would change what happened to Chu's own career, only that it would change Jia-Chen's life.

Gods, this movie makes me hungry. I know full well that I wouldn't eat half the food these people cooked--I don't like fish, to start!--but so much of it all but leaps out of the screen at you. Both Chu and Jia-Chen are clearly excellent at cooking, and both only really know how to cook for large groups. The lunches Chu makes for little Shan-Shan (Yu-Chien Tang) would feed her whole class, just about; one suspects they do.