Chef's Ballad

By Ricahrd Shickel

The year's best action sequence? Easy. It's Mr. Chu (Sihung Lung), a master chef, slicing, dicing, chopping, boiling, broiling, steaming the ingredients of the dinner he prepares every Sunday for his three not entirely grateful daughters. It's the culinary arts rendered as thrillingly as the martial arts, with a middle-age Taiwanese cook appearing as deft and graceful in his peaceful trade as Bruce Lee ever was in his more violent one.

Eat Drink Man Woman presents Mr. Chu's morality as simple -- feed the body artfully, and the soul will take care of itself -- but the chef is not without cunning outside the kitchen. His children are not aware of that, nor can they see that his meals are metaphors for love; they see them as a form of torture added to their other torments. The eldest, Jia-Jen (Kuei-Mei Yang), is a spinster schoolteacher, pining for a lost love but beginning to moon over the cute new gym teacher. The youngest, Jia-Ning (Yu-Wen Wang), is rebelling by working in a fast-food restaurant and taking a lover who reads Dostoyevsky and rides a motorcycle. In the middle is Jia-Chien (Chien-Lien Wu), interrupting her yuppie bustle for liaisons that can't go anywhere.

As things work out in this comfortably intricate comedy by Ang Lee (who directed last year's The Wedding Banquet), their father, despite his obsession with food, does better than any of them romantically. This is perhaps because cooking at his level has taught him to blend the practical, paradoxical gifts of calculation and improvisation, while his children are -- until they finally right themselves -- befuddled by abstractions and distractions. Like the cuisine it celebrates, this movie is tart, sweet, generous and subtle.