Ang Lee's tantalizing, toothsome, pungent, succulent, nutritious, well-balanced, filling (etc.) comedy about a Taiwanese widower and master chef and his three grown daughters still living at home. This is the sort of material that Yasujiro Ozu used to take to the depths of profundity, while always maintaining a bravely cheerful surface. Notwithstanding the last nostalgic visit to the soon-to-be-vacated family home, Lee never reaches so deep, and yet for all its shallowness, all its conventional closed-endedness and overcompression, his movie is filled to capacity with the wonderment of human relations and emotions. It matches the complication of his prior effort, The Wedding Banquet, though without the farcical contrivance, and it extends and expands what was best about that one: the scrupulous monitoring and honoring of a wide range of personalities and attitudes. The food preparation and presentation, neither more nor less attractively photographed than everything else in the movie, are almost a detachable aesthetic issue, begging treatment in some MFA thesis titled "Optical Epicurism in the Modern Cinema," clustered together with the food stuff of the aforementioned Wedding Banquet, and Babette's Feast, Like Water for Chocolate, The Age of Innocence, The Scent of Green Papaya, Tampopo, The Cook, the Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover, and (possible progenitor) Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles. Winston Chao, Sylvia Chang, Sihung Lung, Ah-Leh Gua. (1994) — Duncan Shepherd
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