Eat Drink Man Woman

The opening is one of cinema's great cooking scenes. Before a word of plot, Ang Lee gives us Chef Chu preparing an entire Sunday banquet — netting a live fish, pleating dumplings, carving, deep-frying, steaming — in a wordless montage that tells you everything about the man: total mastery of food, total difficulty with everyone he loves.

The Sunday dinner is the film's spine. A widowed Taipei master chef holds his three grown daughters together through a weekly banquet none of them can quite escape. Each Sunday the announcements at the table pull the family further apart while the food gets ever more magnificent — love and estrangement served on the same plates.

Chu has lost his sense of taste. The film's ache is that the greatest cook in the city can no longer taste his own food; he cooks entirely from memory and love. It's why the banquets read as devotion rather than showmanship.

"Eat, drink, man, woman — these are the basic human desires." The title comes from a Confucian line, and the film treats appetite of every kind as the thing that both connects and complicates us.