Eat Drink Man Woman

Notes as follows:

Eat Drink Man Woman (Yin shin an nu)

Taiwan/USA 1994 (124 minutes)
Director: Ang Lee
Starring: Sihung Lung, Yu-Wen Wang and Chien-lien Wu

Awards and Nominations
Nominated for Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film
Nominated for BAFTA for Best Foreign Language Film
Nominated for Golden Globe for Best Foreign Language Film
A further four wins and seven nominations

Senior Master Chef Chu lives in a large house in Taipei with his three unmarried daughters: a school-teacher nursing a broken heart, a career woman and a student who works in a fast food restaurant. As each daughter encounters a new man and the relationships flourish, their traditional roles within the family evolve. Chu has lost his wife, is losing his sense of taste and is aware that he is getting old. Reminiscing with an old friend Chu comments that the two main human desires are “to eat and drink and to have sex” and the film includes numerous scenes displaying the technique and art of gourmet Chinese cooking for the family’s Sunday dinner, the intricate preparations for the family meal expressing its members’ unspoken feelings for each other.

Ang Lee studied film in New York but made his name in his native Taiwan with two studies of Chinese American relationships in Pushing Hands (1992) and The Wedding Banquet (1993), the second of which was nominated as Best Foreign Film in both the Golden Globes and Oscars. Lee returned to Taiwan for Eat Drink Man Woman, a study of traditional values, modern relationships and family conflicts in Taipei, and after its international success moved to Hollywood.

Lee has subsequently directed a diverse series of films which include Sense and Sensibility (1995) from the novel by Jane Austen, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000) based on the Chinese wuxia (martial arts and chivalry) genre, Hulk (2003) a blockbuster based on the Marvel Comics character, and Brokeback Mountain (2005) a small budget independent film based on a short story by Annie Proulx. To date Lee’s films have won seven Oscars, eight Golden Globes and 12 BAFTAs. He is currently working on Life of Pi, based on the award-winning novel by Yann Martel.

In 2002 Eat Drink Man Woman suffered the usual fate of a successful foreign language film in the US: an English language remake called Tortilla Soup about a Mexican chef and his family in contemporary Los Angeles. Peter Bradshaw described it as “a film so tooth-grindingly irritating you will feel your mouth filling up with enamel powder”.