Eat Drink Man Woman

FOREWORD

Before I begin, I would like to thank my friend Nic Sanderson for helping me with this blossay. This is actually my second final draft (the first one really sucked) and Nic is one of the reasons this one turned out okay. He watched the film with me and helped point out details I have missed, and our discussions on the film helped me more fully develop my ideas and theories about the film. Although this blossay is mine, the ideas cannot be said to be completely mine as his input was invaluable. Thank you, Nic. You were a huge help.

THE PLOT

                Ang Lee’s film Eat Drink Man Woman is a beautiful film focusing on the personal and professional lives of an old widowed chef and his three daughters. The chef, known as Chu, lives with his three daughters in the Taiwanese city of Taipei. Once a week, Chef Chu lovingly cooks a large traditional Chinese dinner for his daughters to share with him. Despite losing much of his sense of taste due to old age, he pours his love for his daughters into each meal. He begins to cook lunches for Shan-shan, the young daughter of the Jin-Rong, a close family friend. Jin-Rong’s mother returns from America to help Jin-Rong through her divorce, and it appears that Chu and the mother have a bit of a romance. However, it is revealed that Chu and Jin-Rong have had a secret romance for quite some time and that they are planning on getting married.

Chu’s eldest daughter, Jia-Jen, is a chemistry teacher who has never truly recovered from getting her heart broken in college. She is a Christian woman, which is fairly rare in Taiwan, and harshly reprimands a student for having a love not in class. Afterwards, she receives a series of anonymous love notes that she suspects who is the new volleyball coach. She slowly falls in love with him, but finds out that it was not the coach that had written the notes, but a group of students getting revenge against her. When the coach goes to console her, she kisses him, and the two get married to each other quite suddenly.

Chu’s second oldest daughter, Jia-Chien, is a very successful airline executive. At the beginning of the film she is involved in a casual sexual relationship with her former boyfriend, Raymond. Raymond had helped her find a new apartment so she could move out of her father’s house. Jia-Chien and Chu have a complex relationship, and the two are constantly in conflict. This is largely due to Jia-Chien’s love of traditional cooking. She had wanted to become a chef, a male-dominated career path, and follow in her father’s footsteps. Chu refused to allow her to do this, and instead made her go to business school so she could “learn something useful.” Unfortunately, the apartment she had bought was a scam, and the apartment complex was never finished. At her job, she meets a handsome young man named Li Kai. Li Kai and Jia-Chien develop a bit of a romance as sexual tension between the two rises. This coincides with Jia-Chien being offered a promotion that would require her to move to Berlin. While she is being faced with such a life-changing decision, she realizes that Li Kai is the name of the man who broke he older sister’s heart in college. The realization comes right before the two are about to have sex. Li Kai explains that he never even met Jia-Jen, but that he was dating her best friend in college. This comes as a huge shock to Jia-Chien, but she decides to not become Li Kai’s lover anyway. In the end, she is the only one that stays single. She lives alone in her father’s house, and takes over the duty of cooking the traditional Sunday dinner.

Chu’s youngest daughter, Jia-Ning, is a twenty year old student who works part time as a cashier at a fast food restaurant. A friend of hers from work is dating a young artist and existentialist. However, she treats him poorly, and constantly blows him off and stands him up. Jia-Ning befriends him, and they develop feelings for each other. They act upon their feelings, which results in Jia-Ning becoming pregnant with his child. She announces this at Sunday dinner, and then promptly moves in with him.

Feminism

                With so many female roles, an immediate question that comes to minds is if a man can ever be truly equipped to represent a feminist movie. Specifically, did Ang Lee challenge gender roles and create strong female characters (in a feminist sense) in this film? It is a tough question; one that I did not come to a final conclusion on. However, there are numerous aspects of the movie that are at least problematic from a feminist viewpoint.

                Marriage is a recurring theme in Chinese film (at least in the films we have seen this semester) and Eat Drink Man Woman is no exception. Nearly all of the female to female interactions that involve a non-family member involve a discussion on marriage or the conversation somehow fixates on a man. Even the interactions between the sisters focus on males. They are either focusing on each other’s relationships (or lack thereof), their father’s relationships (or lack thereof), or their father’s health and well-being. It is rare for them to talk about movie out, and when they do it is usually in the context of their father and how it affects him, not each other.

                In fact, the women in the movie are largely identified and defined by their relation to men. To begin, the three sisters are all Chu’s daughters, and that is how they are mostly thought of; as daughters, not sisters or individuals.  Each of them is then further defined by the men in their life that is not their father. Jia-Chien is involved with Raymond and then Li Kai. Both of these men are rebellious and disregard or disrespect the authority of patriarchal figures. However, they are still entirely patriarchal in the way they view and treat women, or how they view themselves in relation to others. In short, their dominance over other makes them patriarchs themselves, and Jia-Chen’s relationship to them prevents her from ever seeming independent. Jia-Jen is similar in how she is defined by her fascination and eventual marriage with the volleyball coach. Jia-Ning has almost no individual story line that isn’t somehow relating to her lover. At some points of the film, the women are identified by their current lack of a relationship with men. For instance, Jin-Rong is known as the woman that is going through the divorce. The film does not elaborate on her much until she is then revealed to be Chu’s lover. Jia-Chien is known as the broken hearted teacher that will likely never marry. Meanwhile, Chu and his colleague and best friend Old Wen are defined in ways that are not dependent on others. They are seen and portrayed as individuals.

                Jia-Chien definitely seems as though she is capable of being viewed as just an individual, but on closer examination she seems less and less like a strong female character. She is completely defined by her patriarchal society. Instead of becoming a chef like she wanted, she was banned from the kitchen and sent to business school. After school, she still can’t escape the patriarchal hierarchy that has rule over her life. At her job, she is looked down due to her female status. She is promoted, not because of her hard work, but because the other men weren’t good enough. As her boss put it, “All the men I have sent over are idiots. You’ll have to do,” At all of the low points in her storyline, she seeks comfort in a patriarchal figure, specifically Raymond. At the end of the film, it seems as though she has finally achieved a sense of individuality. However, it is unclear if that is actually the destiny she chose, or if that was forced onto her by the actions of others. After all, it is Raymond who leaves her, not the other way around. Li Kai is the one that says that they should remain good friends. She didn’t decide to live alone as much as her family left her alone in their old house. This all happens after she decided to not take the Berlin job so she can stay with her father, not for herself.

                Jia-Jen is the other character where her relation to patriarchy seems far more obvious. At the beginning, she has no relationship to other men. In fact, she is content to simply take care of her father until he dies. She essentially wants to take up a non-sexual wife role to Chu. At one point, Jia-Chien and Jia-Jen have a conversation on how Jia-Chien thinks Jia-Jen’s only hope to ‘escape’ from this life is to find a man to marry. Although this conversation is already problematic in and of itself, it is made worse by Jia-Jen then undergoing a radical life change for a man, getting married, and then leaving. She claims she wouldn’t want to be “loved for her voice” at the beginning. She didn’t want her relationships with other to be superficial. Yet, she radically changes her appearance so she can become involved with the volleyball coach. As she falls in love with the volleyball coach, she stops listening to choral music, and instead focuses of the coach. She isn’t ‘gaining’ a relationship with a man, but actually, she is replacing another man, Jesus, with the coach. In fact, earlier in the movie, Old Wen jokes that Jia-Jen has the perfect ‘boy-friend’, Jesus. And, just like Jia-Jen, at her lowest point in her storyline, when she finds out the letters are a prank by some students, she turns not to her family but to the coach, a man, for comfort, and kisses him.

Patriarchy

                The way Ang Lee portrays patriarchy in Eat Drink Man Woman is also problematic in the way it reinforces certain notions of how a patriarchal figure, specifically the father, is supposed to act. Chu is in many ways a stereotypical patriarch. He is distant in many ways, mildly authoritarian, and has difficulty showing his love for others. His main way of showing affection is cooking. Chu tells Old Wen at one point, “I cook with my feelings, not my taste.” He pours his heart and soul into each Sunday dinner. It is his way of showing his love for his daughters. But, he never explicitly indicates that to his daughters, which leads to them not appreciating the Sunday dinner and feeling at times as though he is unexpressive to them. Interestingly enough, there aren’t any scenes in the movie that he shows love and affection for Jin-Rong. Instead, all of his affection is sent through Jin-Rong’s daughter in the form of cooked lunches.  It could even be that Chu is at heart a father, and can’t give that up. Or, perhaps being a father is the only way he remembers how to love. Even when he announces to the family that he is to move in with Jin-Rong, he first takes several shots of alcohol, and even then he announces it like he is reading an official report.

                Chu does show love in another way that is a more traditional form of patriarchal love. He uses his authority and power to fall back into a disciplinary role that is for the ‘good of the family’. The most obvious example of this is when he bans Jia-Chien from becoming a chef so she can ‘learn something useful’. It may seem like he was merely being cruel by forcing his daughter to go to business school, but to Chu he was fulfilling his duty as the patriarch of the family by looking out for the best interests of his daughter. Or more accurately, he was fulfilling his duty as the patriarch of the family by looking out for the best interest of his daughter according to him. There is another moment when he is waking up his daughters that he expresses love to one of his daughters, but he does this while she is asleep. Then, he wakes her up by yelling.

                One scene that really exemplifies the status of the father is the first dinner scene. The first full shot of the whole family is taken from the point of view of the patriarch with the three daughters sitting at the table across and diagonal from him. Then, when he leaves mid-way through that first dinner, the same shot occurs, but with him absent. The dinner falls apart quickly without him there. I must say, I give a lot of credit to Ang Lee to so easily show that Chu is the keystone of the family in just a single short scene.

Content and Form

                Before I wrap things up, I want to touch on how much Eat Drink Man Woman reminded me of Ozu. Ang Lee does an excellent job of capturing very average moments in the lives of Chu’s family, and he does it with such precision it’s astounding. Although the scenes that are conversational in nature have no specific form in their composition, the everyday tasks are shot in what seems to be a very specific fashion. These scenes of the more boring aspects of life, like doing the laundry, riding the bus, or getting a massage, are shot with a fixed camera that doesn’t move. The angles are always very specific, focusing not on the character(s), but on the action itself.

                Perhaps the best example of this type of shot is found whenever someone is cooking. The camera is fixed, occasionally moving with the hands as the chef works with a precision that rivals that of the camera work. To Chu and Jia-Chien, cooking is a form of meditation. As they do what comes naturally to them, they reflect on their life, unwind, and express themselves. This sort of meditation is passed onto the audience as it is captivated by the pure repetition and precision of his movements. Anytime a shot like this occurs, it allows the viewer a moment to catch their breath and reflect what is happening in the movie. In this sense, these scenes are very much like an Ozu film.

                The meticulousness of these scenes also indicates another aspect of life that Ang Lee may have been trying to get at. By treating these scenes with the same, if not more, care as plot driven scenes, Ang Lee is saying that what a person does is just as important, if not more, as what a person says, and who a person is associated with. These tasks, although monotonous, are just as much a part of life as anything else.

Conclusion

                Although this movie has some issues with patriarchy and feminism, what movie doesn’t? Eat Drink Man Woman is an excellent film. The cinematography is fantastic, the plot and character development is very well done, and the cooking scenes are really, really cool. It makes your mouth water at times. I would recommend this to anyone who likes Ang Lee’s other films, as it has many similar themes and stylistic choices. I would also recommend this film to anyone who is a fan of Chinese cuisine (seriously, it’s not fair how good those meals look) or anyone who likes dramas. In the film, Old Wen asks Chu, “Eat, drink, man, woman… Is there more to life?” I think that Ang Lee’s film Eat Drink Man Woman shows with ease that there is in fact much, much more.