Eat Drink Man Woman



""Eat, drink, man, woman. Basic human desires. Can't avoid them. All my life, that's all I've ever done. It pisses me off.""

A 1994 romantic drama by Ang Lee. Tao Chu, the semi-retired Master Chef of a large restaurant in Taipei, is a melancholic widower who lives in a large house with his three unmarried daughters: Jia-Jen, a heartbroken chemistry teacher; Jia-Chien, a fast-rising airline executive; and Jia-Ning, a teen student who works in a fast food restaurant. Though they live together, the family is emotionally isolated, and their last remaining common ground is an elaborate dinner every Sunday night. Tensions mount as the daughters try to seek personal fulfillment while balancing the issues arising from their father's advancing age.

Nominated for the 1995 Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. Remade with Hispanic characters as Tortilla Soup.

This film provides examples of the following tropes

 * Babies Ever After: At the end of the movie,
 * The Baby Trap:
 * Died Standing Up: gets winded for a moment, sits down... and dies.
 * Fainting: Madam Liang has a high-profile Emotional Faint after
 * Food Porn: And HOW! Every scene with Tao Chu near a kitchen is a spectacle, and Jia-Chien's own cooking is nothing to shrug off, either.
 * Friends With Benefits: Jia-Chien and her ex-boyfriend.
 * Honorary Uncle: "Old Wen", Chu's Supreme Chef friend, is an Honorary Uncle to his daughters. Chu himself is an Honorary Grandfather to his neighbor's girl, Shan-Shan.
 * I Just Want to Be Loved
 * Law of Inverse Fertility:
 * Loud of War: After Jia-Jen gets completely frustrated by her neighbor's loud karaoke sessions, she drags two large speakers from the living room, point them towards the neighbors, and begins playing classical music at full blast.
 * Married to The Job: The family thinks Jia-Chien is like this. In reality, she has a Friends With Benefits relationship with her ex-boyfriend, and later
 * May December Romance:
 * Mistaken for Dying: Jia-Chien thinks her father has heart problems when she sees him visiting a doctor at the hospital's cardiac department.
 * Multigenerational Household
 * My Own Private I Do: She doesn't tell the family until later.
 * Obnoxious in Laws: Madam Liang, the mother of neighbor Jin-Rong, spends almost all of her screen time berating her daughters as burdensome and insulting the men they married. She is visibly elated when her daughter in America gets divorced, and vows to mount the divorce papers over the toilet.
 * Parent With New Paramour: Played straight when Chu's daughters believe he plans to propose to Madam Liang, the Obnoxious Mother-In-Law, and fret accordingly.
 * Playing Hard to Get: Jia-Ning's friend takes tangible glee in tormenting her boyfriend Guo Lun with this.
 * Prank Date:
 * R Rated Opening: An early scene shows Jia-Chien frolicking in bed with her ex-boyfriend. There's no nudity, but it's enough to twig the concerned parents in the audience.
 * Supreme Chef: Tao Chu, naturally. His school lunches for Shan-Shan soon cause crowds of students to mob her with food requests.