Yin shi nan nu
Ang Lee (1994)
Ang Lee’s third feature, his last before the move to Hollywood. (I hadn’t realised that his association with James Schamus went this far back: the pair co-wrote each part of the director’s ‘Chinese trilogy’, which Eat Drink Man Woman completes.) Lee punctuates the action with images of traffic in the centre of Taipei, images in which the most conspicuous elements are the uniformed traffic controller and a yellow taxi. Even if yellow cabs are the norm in Taipei, the car seems to function here as a symbol of the Americanisation of Taiwan: the collision between the country’s traditional culture and an encroaching new one is central to Eat Drink Man Woman. It’s the story of Chu, a widowed, semi-retired master chef, and his three daughters, all of whom still live with their father. The eldest, Jia-Jen, is a schoolteacher, who looks resigned to spinsterhood. The middle one, Jia-Chen, is a successful and still ambitious career woman. The youngest, Jia-Ning, is a student. Each of them is to some extent inflected away from her native culture towards Western, especially American, values. Jia-Jen is a born again Christian (who listens to religious music on a Walkman). Jia-Chen works for an airline: at the start of the film she’s about to buy her own apartment but also has the offer of a job in Amsterdam. Jia-Ning works part-time in a McDonalds. As he introduces the three girls, Lee keeps cross-cutting to Chu, preparing an amazing array of traditional Chinese dishes for the Sunday meal which has become a family ritual and, to the younger daughters at least, a weekly ordeal. We see Jia-Jen in church, Jia-Chen snatching a quick bit of sex en route back from the office to the family home, Jia-Ning talking with a Dostoyevsky-reading boy student whom her burger-bar colleague is in the process of jilting.
The film’s title is a clear indication of its themes. (Chu says to his old friend and colleague Wen at the inebriated end of an evening together: ‘Eat, drink, man, woman, food, sex – the basics of life’. He might have added death, which claims Wen before the film is over.) Ang Lee sets everything out clearly and skilfully and we quickly pick up the cultural tensions and ironies. The characters use food for different purposes: as a means of asserting waning authority; as a proxy for courtship; as a reminder of thwarted ambition (Jia-Chen would rather have worked in a kitchen than the corporate world but her father didn’t think women were up to being chefs). It’s easy to see why the film – an Eastern movie that’s highly accessible to Western audiences – was an international success at the time. Yet Eat Drink Man Woman, although it’s intelligent, fluent and well acted (especially by Sihung Lu as Chu and Chien-lien Wu as Jia-Chen), now feels a little bland. The cultural issues are overlaid rather than worked through into the characters and their relationships. The developments in the daughters’ situations, especially the romantic reversals of fortune of the two eldest, are mechanical. There are some crude characters, especially the husband-hunting elderly mother of a self-effacing family friend (here too it’s no surprise that both mother and daughter eventually get what they deserve). As he enters old age, Chu is losing his sense of taste. His recovery of it in a final scene of reconciliation with his middle daughter – after he’s criticised her for putting too much ginger in the dish he’s sampling – is too neat. This is a cheap shot but it’s hard to resist comparing Eat Drink Man Woman with a Chinese meal – in the quickly forgotten sense.
31 January 2010
