In the years following his graduation from film school in the United States, Ang Lee spent a lot of time at home cooking and looking after his children while his wife went out to work. Food, Lee has recalled in interviews, became in those days a way of expressing his love for his family and he hoped he would be able to bring those sentiments to screen one day.
Eat Drink Man Woman (1994), the third and finest in Lee’s ‘Father Knows Best’ trilogy ( Pushing Hands and The Wedding Banquet being the other two), is a culmination of some of those early experiences.
The film revolves around taciturn ex-chef Chu (Sihung Lung) who regularly cooks elaborate meals at home for his three daughters. There are long sequences with little-to-no dialogue where we see him arduously preparing a variety of tempting dishes as if for a banquet, treating the food with his hands — chopping, flaying and stirring — and finally laying them out on the dinner table as if also for the viewers to feast their eyes on.
Food sells
The film’s secondary plotlines too have food woven into them in one way or another. Lee has described the difficulties — hours of preparation, exactness of timing and enlisting of real chefs — of shooting food in the film. And this was all to make the food appear exciting to the point of seeming seductive.
Lee’s argument was that if sex had been used for years in cinema to titillate, food too could be used for the same ends. Seeing how fashionable phrases like ‘food porn’ have become today and the way visual media has capitalised on the attractive portrayal of preparing and eating food, a look back at one of the earliest examples of a worldwide cultural phenomenon is worthwhile.
Cooking and food serve multiple purposes in Eat Drink... For old Chu, it is a means of holding on to the art and practices of traditional Chinese cuisine which are slowly losing ground in the face of new developments, indicated by the presence of the popular fast food joint where his youngest daughter Jia-Ning (Yu-Wen Wang) works. In fact, through its familial drama, Eat Drink... constantly hints at the emerging clashes between tradition and modernity, old and new, East and West, in a fast-changing Taiwan.
Moreover, in the absence of a mother who presumably once held the family together, food is also Chu’s way of re-establishing a bond with his daughters, each of whom has her own independent life and concerns. That he has lost touch not just with his children but also with what connects him to them — his food — is evident in his psychosomatic loss of taste. In this household where conversations are meagre and misunderstandings common, expectations frequently remain unmet and the family dinner invariably becomes an occasion for discord or surprise announcements.
Deeply affecting
Food is also at the heart of and indeed dictates the film’s most fully-realised relationship: the one between Chu and his middle daughter Jia-Chien (Chien-lien Wu). They were once close but he had discouraged her culinary aspirations, wishing her to excel elsewhere. In the closing sequence, as she reclaims the home kitchen, cooking the film’s final dinner, food brings about reconciliation. With Chu regaining his sense of taste, relations with both food and family are restored.
Lee’s relationship with his own father haunts these early films, all of which contain strong, conservative father figures estranged from their westernised children. It was only later in his own life that Lee’s headmaster father approved of his son’s professional choices. Over the years, Lee has forayed into a variety of genres and subjects but what has remained unchanged is his extraordinary ability to tell visually sumptuous, deeply affecting stories.
Cinema, coffee and canines are the three great loves of this Mumbai-based film writer. @cinememsaab
