The title of "Eating Men and Women" comes from the "Book of Etiquette" "Eating Men and Women, People's Great Desires Survive". To put it bluntly: appetite and male and female love, is the greatest desire of people, director Ang Lee uses the phrase "diet men and women", to food metaphor, discuss the relationship between men and women, is lust and appetite, but also part of daily life.
"Eating Men and Women" is the final song of Ang Lee's "Father Trilogy" after "Pushing Hands" and "Wedding Feast", the film tells the story of Lao Zhu, who was once a Grandmaster chef in Taiwan, and after his early widowhood, he lived with his three daughters. In the film, Lao Zhu is a person with a stoic personality, and his feelings for his daughters are the same, after retirement, his favorite thing to do is to cook food, and to hold a family gathering every Sunday as an agreement, to meet and contact the three daughters.
Old Zhu and old erjiaqian
Lao Zhu's three daughters can be described as having different personalities, the eldest sister Jiazhen is a teacher, believes in Jesus, and is inferior and conservative in nature, relying on the feelings of fantasy to survive and paralyze herself. The second sister Jiaqian is a professional woman, confident and optimistic, open-minded, still maintaining a "sex partner" relationship with her ex, and is also the first person to propose that she wants to leave the family. Little sister Jia Ning is a college student, who works part-time in a fast food restaurant on weekdays, and has been living under the protection of her father, and her little daughter seems innocent but has the most cunning. In the film, the five family banquets of the old Zhu family connect the lives of men and women who eat and drink, which is really a proper emotional feast.
The three sisters of the Zhu family
The beginning of the film begins with a surging crowd, and a new day begins, and early in the morning of this day, Lao Zhu begins to prepare for the family feast. The cheerful music rhythm sounds, scraping fish, catching chicken and other ingredients are constantly switching, and then plum vegetable button meat, Hakka stir-fried, sauce fried conch, stir-fried snail slices, double pepper stir-fried squid head, yellow braised chicken wings, crispy char siu sauce ribs, zi bai fungus fried meat slices, curry crayfish, American ginseng stewed black bones and other dishes one by one, all arouse the appetite of the viewers, and this is also the first family banquet in the film.
The knife worked
Plum vegetables buckle meat
Lao Zhu's preparation with such care is actually to announce something, but the second sister, who has been constantly contradicting her father, has repeatedly interrupted her father's words with the sentence "I bought a house and want to move out". Through the contradiction between Jiaqian and his father, Ang Lee naturally leads to the common parent-child relationship in Chinese families, which is not prominent, but interlocked.
Old Zhu was angry with his second daughter and left the table
At the beginning of the second family banquet, liang mu, an old acquaintance of the Zhu family, returned to China and went to visit their family. In the contact with Lao Zhu, Liang's mother had ideas about Lao Zhu, and Lao Zhu also catered to Liang's mother on the surface, and the daughters thought that Liang's mother was very suitable for a pair with her father, but his remarriage candidate stunned everyone...
Two that seem to be very suitable
Then it was Sunday, at the third family banquet, the youngest daughter of the family, Jia Ning, suddenly announced the news of her pregnancy, this seemingly well-behaved and sensible little daughter who was still studying, but the one with the most ideas, Jia Ning then moved away from the house and lived in her boyfriend's house, in fact, this boyfriend was taken from her friend.
The most rebellious little sister
After experiencing the departure of the younger daughter, the fourth family banquet also came soon, this time announcing the news is the most conservative big sister, that is, the eldest daughter Jiazhen, who said that she wanted to accompany her father, suddenly announced the news that she was about to get married, and the boyfriend was a physical education teacher in the same middle school, and she also took the initiative to "attack" the boyfriend.
The eldest sister took her boyfriend home to visit
Immediately after the most classic fifth family banquet, Lao Zhu said that he wanted to be with his daughter's classmate Jinrong, and as soon as the words came out, it was not only Liang's mother who was shocked, but also left a table of people speechless. And this actually corresponds to the theme of "eating men and women", from another point of view, from Ang Lee's previous cameo "Wedding Feast", he has secretly poked and poked to say that "what you see is the result of China's five thousand years of sexual repression."
Unexpected ending
After the death of his wife, Lao Zhu has been taking care of his three daughters at home for more than ten years, the film from the beginning of Lao Zhu lost his sense of taste, to the end of the sudden recovery of taste, this loss, but also reflects the taste of Old Zhu to regain life, life ushered in the second spring, so he left the old house, moved to a new home with his daughter's classmates, and his wife is pregnant, and he will become a father again.
Old Zhu's second marriage to his wife
Perhaps in the traditional Chinese concept, Lao Zhu is not a good father, because he did not follow traditional values, did not keep lonely, and did not restrain his desires, Lao Zhu chose to remarry a woman of the same age as his daughters, which is contrary to morality and ethics from the perspective of traditional Chinese ideas and concepts, and if it can be interpreted from Western culture, this is also a liberation of human nature. Ang Lee's works, not only "Eating Men and Women", but also "Wedding Feast" and "Pushing Hand", are full of the transformation of traditional oriental fathers under the conflict of Chinese and Western cultures, this time Ang Lee is taking the family as the carrier and taking the food as the boundary to carry out the deep integration of Chinese and Western cultures, which also explains the inclusiveness and assimilation of Chinese civilization.