Movie Description
Eat Drink Man Woman is a 1994 comedy-drama film directed by Ang Lee and starring Sihung Lung, Yu-wen Wang, Chien-lien Wu, and Kuei-mei Yang. The film was released on 3 August 1994, and it was both a critical and box office success. In 1994, the film received the Asia Pacific Film Festival Award for Best Film, and in 1995 it received an Academy Award Nomination for Best Foreign Language Film.
The title is a quote from the Book of Rites, one of the Confucian classics, referring to the basic human desires and accepting them as natural. The beginning of the quote reads as follows: "The things which men greatly desire are comprehended in meat and drink and sexual pleasure;" (Translation by James Legge)
Many of the cast members had appeared in Ang Lee's previous films. Sihung Lung and Ah Lei Gua played central elderly figures dealing with the transition from tradition to modernity in The Wedding Banquet, in which Winston Chao also starred. Sihung Lung played an immigrant father in Pushing Hands. These three films show the tensions between the generations of a Confucian family, between East and West, and between tradition and modernity. They form what has been called Lee's "Father Knows Best" trilogy. The script was written by Ang Lee, James Schamus and Hui-Ling Wang.