Film Review: Eat Drink Man Woman 飲食男女 (1994) - Taiwan
Reviewed by Andrew Chan (Film Critics Circle of Australia)
I rated it 10/10
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★
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There is a moment early in Ang Lee’s Eat Drink Man Woman when the master chef Chu stands alone in his kitchen before dawn, testing the temperature of oil with a single drop of water. It sizzles perfectly. He nods once, almost imperceptibly, and begins. That small, private gesture contains the entire film: precision, ritual, loneliness, and the stubborn belief that if you prepare everything correctly, love might still arrive at the table.
Chu (Sihung Lung) is a widower, one of Taipei’s great traditional chefs, now reduced to cooking for an airline and for the three adult daughters who still live under his roof. Every Sunday he prepares an extravagant multi-course dinner that none of them particularly want to attend. The food is magnificent — we see every chop, every glaze, every careful arrangement — yet the meals are tense, full of silences and half-truths. The daughters are drifting away. The father is losing his sense of taste. The house is too full and somehow already empty.
Lee understands that in certain families, especially Chinese families of a certain generation, emotion is never spoken directly. It is steamed, braised, and plated. When Chu’s eldest daughter Jia-Jen (Yang Kuei-mei), a chemistry teacher and Christian convert, finally reveals a secret that shatters the family’s careful equilibrium, the camera does not cut to faces in shock. It lingers on the untouched dishes cooling on the table. The food has done its work; now it must sit there as witness.
The three daughters are drawn with unusual tenderness and specificity. Jia-Chien (Wu Chien-lien), the ambitious airline executive, carries the film’s sharpest edge and its deepest longing. Jia-Ning (Wang Yu-wen), the youngest, is still soft enough to believe that love might be simple. Each woman is trying to invent a life that does not look like her mother’s, while still circling the gravitational pull of the family table. Lee never judges them for leaving or for staying. He simply watches the cost of both choices.
What elevates the film beyond domestic comedy or cultural study is its absolute faith in the ordinary. A motorcycle ride through night-time Taipei, a stolen kiss in a rainstorm, an old man teaching a little girl how to hold a cleaver — these moments are given the same weight as the grand Sunday feasts. The kitchen sequences are among the most sensual ever put on film, yet they are never merely decorative. Every perfectly cooked dish is also an unanswered prayer.
Sihung Lung’s performance is a masterclass in restraint. He can break your heart with the way he sets down a pair of chopsticks. When his sense of taste begins to fail — the ultimate betrayal for a man who has spent his life trusting his tongue — the tragedy is almost unbearable, and yet Lee refuses pathos. Life continues. New arrangements are made. Someone else will cook the next meal.
Eat Drink Man Woman is that rare film that understands both the comedy and the quiet devastation of family. It knows that we wound each other most deeply at the table we claim to love. And still we keep setting places. Still we keep cooking. Still we hope that this time, when the lids are lifted, everything will be all right. Ang Lee has never made a more generous or more precise film. It is, quite simply, a masterpiece of the everyday. (Neo, 2026)