The opening shot of Eat Drink Man Woman is a statement of intent. For five minutes, Ang Lee shows us Master Chu (Sihung Lung), a widowed patriarch and Taipei's greatest chef, preparing Sunday dinner. A fish is stunned, gutted, and fried in one fluid motion. Meat is chopped with a cleaver moving so fast it becomes a hum. Vegetables are carved, broths are clarified. Cooking as an act of control, as a ritual, as the last language left to a man who has lost the ability to communicate with his family. It is the perfect prologue to a film that uses food not as a metaphor, but as the literal battlefield where tradition and modernity clash, dish after dish.

This is the third and final film in Ang Lee's trilogy dedicated to the “Father,” and it is the culmination. After exploring the father-son relationship in Pushing Hands and The Wedding Banquet, Lee returns to Taipei to analyze the father-daughter relationship. Master Chu is the pillar of a world that is fading away. He is the authority, the guardian of tradition. But his authority is undermined by a cruel irony: he has lost his sense of taste. He can perform the world's most complex recipes from memory, but he cannot enjoy them. He is a culinary god who has lost his faith. The only thing that holds his family together is this Sunday meal, a sumptuous obligation that his three adult daughters, now strangers, find increasingly difficult to bear. The dining table is their trench: a place where tensions are never verbalized, but are served, chewed, and swallowed.

The three daughters embody three different responses to the modernization sweeping Taipei. Jia-Jen, the eldest, is the ghost of tradition. A chemistry teacher, she is trapped in a past of romantic disappointments and has sublimated her repression into a noisy conversion to Christianity. She is rigid, afraid of life, and sees her father's food as almost a sin. Jia-Ning, the youngest, seems the most submissive, working in a fast-food restaurant (the perfect symbol of her father's anti-cooking), but she is the first to carry out her revolution, quietly and pragmatically, “stealing” a friend's boyfriend and leaving home. The real heart of the film, and the father's true adversary, is Jia-Chien, the middle daughter. She is the “modern” one: a successful executive at an airline, sexually liberated, living in a minimalist apartment. But she is also the only one who has inherited her father's talent, the only one who truly understands his art. Her refusal to follow in his footsteps, choosing a career over cooking, is the deepest betrayal. Theirs is the central battle, because they are the only two who speak the same language, even if they use it to fight each other.

The film is structured as a series of meals, and each meal is a revelation or a failure. The precision with which Ang Lee films food is fundamental. The camera does not just observe, it participates: it lingers on the sheen of a lacquered duck, the texture of a broth, the steam rising from a ravioli. Lee understands that in this family, emotions are too complex to be spoken, so they are cooked. The father's love for his daughters is manifested in the complexity of the dishes he prepares for them, but it is a love that, no longer able to be enjoyed, has become a mechanical execution, a duty. Chu's tragedy is that of an artist who no longer feels anything, forced to repeat his masterpieces for an audience that no longer desires them.

The true genius of the film lies in its final subversion. Throughout, Ang Lee prepares us for the daughters' “escape.” He builds tension toward the moment when the three women, one after the other, will announce to their father their intention to leave the nest, thus dismantling the Sunday ritual and the family structure. And when that meal arrives, the air is thick with expectation. But Lee, with a twist of extraordinary subtlety, turns the tables. It is not the daughters who shock their father; it is the father who shocks them. With a calm and definitive announcement, Master Chu reveals himself not as the guardian of tradition, but as the most radical revolutionary of all. It is he who dismantles the family, announcing his new life, and in this act frees his daughters from their obligation. The film shows us that tradition is not a static monolith; to survive, it must be willing to die and be reborn. The final resolution, which sees Jia-Chien and her father sharing a meal again, but this time prepared by her, brings things full circle perfectly. The father, tasting her soup, suddenly regains his sense of taste. The connection is reestablished, no longer through control and ritual, but through a passing of the torch, an act of love that is finally mutual.