EAT DRINK MAN WOMAN (Directed by Ang Lee. Starring Sihung Lung, Kuei Mei Yang, Chein Lien Wu, Yu Wen Wang)

The Chinese food film is a genre I have never really gotten into. It’s not that I don’t like Chinese food, but my enjoyment of the experience of watching it being prepared and eaten seems to depend on my appetite at the time. If I am hungry, I spend half the movie distractedly wishing I had something to eat, but if I am full I sit there feeling slightly nauseous at the very idea of eating. And frankly I already have enough trouble with the concept that eating is a metaphor for sex without having to work out what Stinky Tofu or Joy Luck Dragon Phoenix represent.

Ang Lee puts food not just at the centre of his film, but at the centre of life itself. Food and sex, he seems to suggest, is all there is, or at least all you need for a happy life. But since the family at the centre of the film are unable to communicate on the most trivial of matters, least of all sex, food has to stand in for just about everything. An old master chef, whose taste buds are burned out, presides over regular Sunday banquets with his three daughters. Unable to express his love for them, he feeds them. Misunderstanding his intentions, they pick at his food, and pick holes in each other.

It may sound like a recipe for a dysfunctional drama, but Lee, whose debut was the off-beat hit The Wedding Banquet, serves up a light comedy instead. Although constructed with little of the ordered rigour of the meals at its centre, the story haphazardly probes all the character’s lives with subtle irony and sweet good humour, slowly bringing the many varied ingredients to the boil. Lee carefully reveals how the daughters suffer from guilt rather than hunger pangs over their own sexual needs, while the old man carefully employs the same multi-faceted skills he shows in the kitchen to slowly put some order in his and their lives.

The unexpected highlight of all this family interaction may well be the actual cooking sequences, shot with the kind of kinetic camera movement and editing usually applied to the action sequences of a violent thriller. The chef slices and dices with nailbiting vigour. Well, I bit my nails, anyway, but then I was extremely hungry.

Eat Drink Man Woman is thoughtful, humanistic, pleasantly played and made with genuine craftsmanship, but unless you like your metaphors really well done it may be a little too subtle to satisfy.