Eat Drink Man Woman

Romance and cooking often go hand in hand, a basic domestic fact that apparently is true both East and West. This combined need of the heart and stomach the subject of Eat Drink Man, the new comedy by Taiwanese director Ang Lee. As in his previous hit, The Wedding Banquet, Lee focuses a gently sardonic camera on the contradictions and paradoxes of the contemporary Chinese family. Eat Drink Man Woman is a slower and less satisfying film than The Wedding Banquet, but it has moments of humor and feeling that float to the surface of the movie like the taste of an exotic spice in an otherwise average sauce.

In The Wedding Banquet, Sihung Lung played the father who discreetly arranged the living arrangements for his gay son, daughter-in-law and his son's lover. With Eat Drink Man Woman, Sihung Lung carves out a career for himself as a perpetual Chinese paterfamilias, playing Mr. Chu, an aging, widowed chef whose three adult daughters are as reluctant to live at home as they are unlucky in love. Chu slightly resents his daughters, because he feels that he still has to take care of them. In turn, the three sisters resent him, because they fear that they'll end up having to care for an elderly parent. Their Sunday dinners together, which form the framework of the movie, often turn into a simmering session of repressed hostility.

Matters aren't helped by the fact that the father is a traditionalist who can't quite reconcile himself to the paths chosen by each daughter. The oldest, Jia-Jen (Kuei-Mei Yang), is a high school chemistry teacher who's chosen Christianity as a substitute for a personal life. Jia-Chien (Chien-Lien Wu) is a hard-driven airline executive with an artist boyfriend who doesn't want any sort of commitment. Stirred into this pot is the youngest, Jia-Ning (Yu-Wen), who divides her time between burning burgers at Wendy's and listening to the lost-love lament from her best girlfriend's ex-boyfriend.

Add Winston Chao (whose lead role in The Wedding Banquet made him a major star in the Far East market) as an executive hotshot with Jia-Chien's company, who has a "past history" with the oldest daughter, and you've got a low-key comedy that threatens to drown in its own cliche-ridden broth. Eat Drink Man Woman never quite gets past the innate predictablitiy of its own story, but it manages to throw a few surprises into an uninspiring recipe, nonetheless. Furthermore, Ang Lee continues to exhibit his flair for conveying the details of family life with warmth and subtlety, as well as his good feel for naturalistic humor — a grasp that allows him to make much of the film seem fresh. In that regard, he earns high marks for presentation.