Food in Film (Part Two)

In my last post on favorite films featuring food, I highlighted scenes from three movies featuring rich and meaty Italian cuisine. Let me now turn eastward to the complexity and silkiness of Chinese and Singaporean cuisine as captured in motion pictures.

Moving between these two culinary regions, it is worth noting for years people claimed that the Venetian merchant Marco Polo brought pasta to Italy after tasting noodles on a voyage to the Orient. Food historians now regard this origin story of pasta as most likely a myth. Chinese noodles were documented first in writing at least from the third century BC (and possibly earlier). But whether these noodles led to the invention of pasta in Italy, or pasta developed separately from Chinese influence, remains debatable.

Regardless, what the films I love featuring Italian, Chinese, and Singaporean cuisine all have in common are the ways in which they bring friends and family together to dine. Few shared experiences may be enjoyable as the gathering of loved ones around a table filled with numerous tasty dishes. The three movies that follow make this point in culinary style.

Chinese cuisine

“Eat Drink Man Woman” (1994) — From its opening scene, has there ever been a movie in which you can more readily taste and smell the images on the screen? The film focuses on the difficult relationship between a father (Taiwanese Master Chef Chu) and his three daughters, all of whom gather for Sunday dinners. We watch as Chef Chu deftly and expertly prepares elaborate banquets for his kin, the excess of dishes serving as a metaphor for unspoken familial love and attention.

As the daughters convene around the table during the film, we learn about their professional and personal lives in an age more modern and less patriarchal than the one experienced by their more traditional father. As the daughters bicker and seek resolution, and food sometimes goes uneaten, we become enthralled by some of the most heavenly Chinese cuisine to be captured on celluloid.

Watch for the scenes in which Chef Chu secretly provides the young daughter of a friend with steaming, tiered, multi-course lunches at school and then quietly eats the inferior meals packed by the girl’s mother at home. The ideal school lunch program!

“The Joy Luck Club” (1993) — As with “Eat Drink Man Woman, which came out the following year, many of the scenes in “The Joy Luck Club” occur either in the kitchen or at the dining room table as family members and friends gather to eat and share stories (as well as toss out the occasional veiled criticism). Here though, the focus (same as the popular Amy Tan novel on which the film is based) is on the complex, cross-generational relationships between mothers and daughters.

The symbolism of Chinese food in “The Joy Luck Club” is laden more heavily. Long rice noodles for long life, dumplings shaped like silver ingots for wealth, and orange slices for a sweet life are all featured. The way in which the dishes are prepared, served and eaten also clearly reflects on the cultural changes between the mothers born in China and their more fortunate daughters born in America.

The film was hugely popular when it was released and unique in that it featured an Asian-American cast. Although the hope at the time was that other major studio films with an Asian-American cast would follow, it would be 25 years before the next Hollywood blockbuster with an all-Asian cast (and amazing food scenes) was released. This brings me to…

Singaporean cuisine

“Crazy Rich Asians” (2018) — This extremely popular movie was the cinematic equivalent of a two-hour love letter to Singapore. And well placed among the rich scenery, the colorful outfits and the beautiful people were Singapore’s famous food stalls. The vendors (commonly referred to as hawkers) behind these stalls prepare and offer not only delicious local cuisine but dishes from all across Asia.

As we see in the film, no visit to Singapore is complete without stopping at these busy food markets, such as Newton Centre (Circus), which are open late into the evening. No sooner does the lead actress arrive in Singapore to meet her boyfriend’s family then she is whisked away to a food stall market. There, a group of friends promptly load a table with the hawkers’ fare, which includes satay sticks, chili crabs, stir-fried noodles, chicken rice, and laksa curry.

Luckily for moviegoers, before the ending credits roll, the lead characters also will have eaten their way through meals featuring succulent lobster, braised abalone, longevity noodles, suckling pig, roast meats, baked salmon, local seafood and fancy desserts.

Join me next time as I continue further east to those films celebrating Japanese cuisine. And I invite you to use the comments section to share those films featuring Chinese or Singaporean cuisine that did not make my highlights reel above.

Danilo Diazgranados is an investor, collector, and lover of fine wines and a member of the prestigious Confrérie des Chevaliers du Tastevin, a fraternity of Burgundy wine enthusiasts.