Eat Drink Man Woman
| Eat Drink Man Woman | |
|---|---|
DVD cover
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| Traditional | 飲食男女 |
| Simplified | 饮食男女 |
| Mandarin | yǐn shí nán nǚ |
| Directed by | Ang Lee |
| Produced by |
Hsu Li Kong Hsu Kong |
| Written by | Ang Lee James Schamus Hui-Ling Wang |
| Starring | |
| Music by | Mader |
| Cinematography | Jong Lin |
| Edited by | Ang Lee Tim Squyres |
| Distributed by | The Samuel Goldwyn Company |
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Release date
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Running time
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123 minutes |
| Country | Taiwan |
| Language | Mandarin |
| Box office | $7.2 million |
Eat Drink Man Woman is a 1994 Taiwanese film directed by Ang Lee and starring Sihung Lung, Yu-wen Wang, Chien-lien Wu, and Kuei-mei Yang. The film was released on August 3, 1994, the first of Lee's films to be both a critical and box office success. In 1994, the film received the Asia Pacific Film Festival Award for Best Film, and in 1995 it received an Academy Award Nomination for Best Foreign Language Film.
The title is a quote from the Book of Rites, one of the Confucian classics, referring to the basic human desires and accepting them as natural. The beginning of the quote reads as follows: “The things which men greatly desire are comprehended in meat and drink and sexual pleasure; […]” (Translation by James Legge), Chinese: 「飲食男女，人之大欲存焉」.
Many of the cast members had appeared in Ang Lee's previous films. Sihung Lung and Ah Lei Gua played central elderly figures dealing with the transition from tradition to modernity in The Wedding Banquet, in which Winston Chao also starred. Sihung Lung played an immigrant father in Pushing Hands. These three films show the tensions between the generations of a Confucian family, between East and West, and between tradition and modernity. They form what has been called Lee's "Father Knows Best" trilogy.
The setting is 1990s contemporary Taipei, Taiwan. Mr. Chu (C: 老朱, P: Lǎo Zhū "Old Chu"; Sihung Lung), a widower who is a master Chinese chef, has three unmarried daughters, each of whom challenges any narrow definition of traditional Chinese culture:
Each Sunday Mr. Chu makes a glorious banquet for his daughters, but the dinner table is also the family forum, or perhaps “torture chamber,” to which each daughter brings “announcements” as they negotiate the transition from traditional “father knows best” style to a new tradition which encompasses old values in new forms.
Other characters include:
As the film progresses, each daughter encounters new men. When these new relationships blossom, their roles are broken and the living situation within the family changes. The father eventually brings the greatest surprise to the audience at the end of the story.
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Wikipedia