Eighteen years after Ang Lee’s (李安) Eat Drink Man Woman (飲食男女) hit the big screen, the film’s producer Hsu Li-kong (徐立功) and award-winning television director Tsao Jui-yuan (曹瑞原) are releasing what’s billed as the sequel, Joyful Reunion (飲食男女—好遠又好近), which stars one of the original cast, Kui Ya-lei (歸亞蕾).
The film relies on the same concept of mixing food and human relationships, but content-wise it’s not sequel at all. The result, a narratively uneven tale about two families in China and Taiwan, delivered with a message of reunification, is nothing like Lee’s 1994 work, which explores familial relations and social reality.
In present-day Hangzhou, China, aging chef Tang Shizhe (Kenneth Tsang, 曾江) and his two daughters lead respectable and comfortable lives, thanks to the father’s prosperous vegetarian restaurant.
Photo courtesy of Activator Marketing Company
The elder daughter, Wa’er (Huo Siyan, 霍思燕), whose boyfriend, Chang Chuan (Blue Lan, 藍正龍), is a slightly nerdy computer game designer from Taipei, manages a luxury health resort.
One day Chang takes his aunt, Pai Ping (Kuei), who raised him like her own son, back to Hangzhou after a trip to Taipei.
To Ping, the Chinese city, which she grew up in and has not visited after fleeing to Taiwan during the Chinese Civil War, looks unrecognizable at first. But she soon settles into the luxurious surroundings at the resort where Wa’er works.
Meanwhile, Shizhe announces his plan to sell the restaurant because the chronic illness he suffers from is starting to take its toll. While agonized by her father’s condition, Wa’er is fed up with being neglected by Chang, who spends too much time in the virtual world, and decides to break up with him.
In an attempt to get the two back together, Pai phones Shizhe, who invites her to his restaurant for a feast. When the elders meet, memories come rushing back.
The film’s most glaring flaw is its structurally shaky screenplay, which was penned by six writers and two contributors, who are credited with “script coordination.”
While the movie’s most enjoyable moments are when the screen is dominated by Kui’s high-energy performance, she sometimes overdoes the comic delivery.
Anchored by Tsang’s quiet poise, Kui moves freely from a forthright, loud-mouthed waishengren (外省人, or person who fled to Taiwan after the Chinese Civil War) visiting The New China, to a woman reliving the emotions of her past life.
As the English title suggests, Joyful Reunion is more of a fairy-tale in which two generations learn to get along and live happily ever after. Whether the film is politically naive, or just a cynical ploy to tap China’s market, is up to the audience to decide.
June 2 to June 8 Taiwan’s woodcutters believe that if they see even one speck of red in their cooked rice, no matter how small, an accident is going to happen. Peng Chin-tian (彭錦田) swears that this has proven to be true at every stop during his decades-long career in the logging industry. Along with mining, timber harvesting was once considered the most dangerous profession in Taiwan. Not only were mishaps common during all stages of processing, it was difficult to transport the injured to get medical treatment. Many died during the arduous journey. Peng recounts some of his accidents in
“Why does Taiwan identity decline?”a group of researchers lead by University of Nevada political scientist Austin Wang (王宏恩) asked in a recent paper. After all, it is not difficult to explain the rise in Taiwanese identity after the early 1990s. But no model predicted its decline during the 2016-2018 period, they say. After testing various alternative explanations, Wang et al argue that the fall-off in Taiwanese identity during that period is related to voter hedging based on the performance of the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP). Since the DPP is perceived as the guardian of Taiwan identity, when it performs well,
A short walk beneath the dense Amazon canopy, the forest abruptly opens up. Fallen logs are rotting, the trees grow sparser and the temperature rises in places sunlight hits the ground. This is what 24 years of severe drought looks like in the world’s largest rainforest. But this patch of degraded forest, about the size of a soccer field, is a scientific experiment. Launched in 2000 by Brazilian and British scientists, Esecaflor — short for “Forest Drought Study Project” in Portuguese — set out to simulate a future in which the changing climate could deplete the Amazon of rainfall. It is
The Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) on May 18 held a rally in Taichung to mark the anniversary of President William Lai’s (賴清德) inauguration on May 20. The title of the rally could be loosely translated to “May 18 recall fraudulent goods” (518退貨ㄌㄨㄚˋ！). Unlike in English, where the terms are the same, “recall” (退貨) in this context refers to product recalls due to damaged, defective or fraudulent merchandise, not the political recalls (罷免) currently dominating the headlines. I attended the rally to determine if the impression was correct that the TPP under party Chairman Huang Kuo-Chang (黃國昌) had little of a
RSS