382. Eat Drink Man Woman (饮食男女) (1994)

Starring: Lung Sihung, Wang Yu-wen, Wu Chien-Lien

Director: Ang Lee

Running Time: 124 mins

Eat Drink Man Woman (饮食男女) is a Taiwanese film about three grown women, all living with their ageing father, who find themselves in new relationships that are due to turn all of their lives upside down.

This film was quite interesting. The story was unfortunately pretty predictable, however in the end, I felt that it was clever enough, showing in great detail the lives of these women, which was indeed a fascinating story.

I’ll start by saying that this film was a little melodramatic. There were some comedic aspects to it, making it more entertaining to watch, however the way in which all of the characters seemed to regard the shifts experienced in their lives because of their new relationships was often completely over the top, making the story lose a little bit of credibility in my opinion.

However, I felt that the characterisation in this film was fantastic. Sticking three women, all with very different ambitions, yet similar philosophies, together with their more traditional and strict father, not open to them suddenly moving out because they have found a new man a couple of minutes ago, made for truly interesting emotional conflict, both between characters, and also themselves, as they struggle to reveal secrets for fear of upsetting the rest of their family.

Overall, I’ll give this a 7.0, because although the story wasn’t the best ever, being quite predictable, I still thought that this had many very intriguing aspects to it, occasionally surprising me along the way.