“Eat Drink Man Woman” - Ang Lee (1994)

Taiwan-born Ang Lee (pinyin: Li An) has been a highly successful film director whose versatility over the years has been demonstrated with productions undertaken across several different continents and with themes spanning multiple different genres and social contexts – for example: The Wedding Banquet (1993), Sense and Sensibility (1997), Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000), Brokeback Mountain (2005), Lust, Caution (2007), and Life of Pi (2012).  But I think Lee’s greatest film was one of his earliest, Eat Drink Man Woman (1994).  This is a compelling work that, despite its Taiwanese/Chinese cultural context, is concerned generally with how romantic concerns can interact with family values, and so it can be appreciated by just about everyone [1,2,3,4,5,6].  

The film’s story about a master chef in Taipei and his three grownup daughters was scripted by Ang Lee, James Schamus, and Hui-Ling Wang.  And the film’s overall production values, including the acting, were excellent, but extra special praise should be singled out for the cinematography by Jong Lin and the film editing by Ang Lee and Tim Squyres.  In some respects it is the cinematography and film editing that help elevate this film to a truly high status.

The film opens with a detailed presentation of Lao (“Old”, an honorific in Chinese) Chu preparing an elaborate dinner for his three grownup daughters.  The daughters are unmarried and so live at Chu’s home, but they are often out attending to their own personal affairs.  However, Lao Chu expects, indeed demands, that they all unfailingly attend the Sunday dinner that he prepares for them every week, as a ritual and as a precious instrument for family bonding.  Chu has been a widower for the past sixteen years and has largely raised his three daughters during that time on his own.  And like many parents, he is concerned that his daughters, who are all exposed to modernist influences of contemporary Taiwanese society, will start drifting away.  So for Chu, the weekly Sunday dinner is crucial; but for the three daughters, the dinner is boring and almost a form of torture.

For the rest of the film, the viewer is treated to four parallel and interlaced narratives that trace the mostly separate and interpersonal concerns of Chu and his three daughters.  We soon discover  the following basic information about them.

• Lao Chu (played by Sihung Lung) is an aging but famous chef in Taipai and is the master chef at a huge and important hotel in Taipei.  In fact it is widely said that Chu is Taipei’s finest chef, and he is generally used to being in command of those around him.  However Chu is now losing what is critical for a chef, his sense of taste.  So he has to rely on his old friend and fellow master chef Lao Wen (Jui Wang) to sample all his food concoctions to make sure they have been seasoned properly.
   
  
• Jia-Jen (Kuei-Mei Yang), Lao Chu’s oldest daughter, is about 29-years old and works as a high school chemistry teacher.  She is sensitive and reserved and, compared to the other sisters, an upholder of traditional values.  In addition, she has recently become a devout conservative Christian.  Jia-Jen has a close woman friend, Liang Jin-Rong (Sylvia Chang), who was a former school classmate and with whom she often gets together to share concerns, such as Jin-Rong’s drawn-out divorce process.  Jia-Jen’s other friends, worried that she is getting old to find a marriage partner, try to help her in this area, but Jia-Jen shows no interest in dating anybody.  She still hasn’t gotten over a failed love interest when she was in college nine years ago.
   
  
• Jia-Chien (Chien-Lien Wu) is the second-oldest daughter and quite different from Jia-Jen.  Unlike her attractive but quiet and modestly dressing older sister, Jia-Chen is glamorous and outgoing.  She is an energetic, rising executive for an airline company, and she is accustomed to expressing her opinions when she feels like it.  She is also the least tolerant of their father’s Sunday dinners and intends to move out of the home as soon as the new apartment she has purchased is ready.  On the romantic front, she is confidant and bold, e.g. she has a purely sexual relationship with a male friend, Raymond (Chit-Man Chan),  that involves no commitments from either party.  She treasures her independence.
   
  
• Jia-Ning (Yu-Wen Wang), the youngest sister, is 20-years-old and works at a Wendy’s fast-food restaurant while attending college classes.  She is generally upbeat and usually deferent to her more opinionated older sisters.
  

So all four members of the Chu family, though different, are relatively well-balanced; and in accordance with family traditions, they are expected to share with each other what is happening in their respective lines when they get together on Sunday for dinner.  But over the course of this film, we see that all four develop romantic relationships concerning which they feel guarded about sharing with each other on Sundays.  And the presented subtlety of those guarded feelings is part of what makes this a great film.  

In this connection there is an early scene in which a Chu family Sunday dinner is interrupted by an emergency at Lao Chu’s posh hotel.  We learn that a big feast for an important gathering at the hotel is in preparation but due to some cooking hitches is evidently headed for disaster.  Lao Chu is summoned to rescue this desperate situation, and in a highly professional way he does indeed save the day – and, in the process, demonstrate his impressive culinary prowess.  Afterwards, Lao Chu and Lao Wen become somewhat inebriated and reflect on what they have learned over the courses of their long lives.  In a reflective moment of gloom, Lao Chu asks his friend,

“Eat drink man woman.  Food sex . . . Is that all there is?”

The rest of the film offers an answer to that question.

As the interlaced narratives of the four Chu family members unfold, the viewer learns about the evolving romantic relationships that develop for them. 

• Jia-Jen is not looking to date anyone, but she has an accidental encounter with her school’s new volleyball coach, Ming-Dao (Chin-Cheng Lu), and further encounters stir an interest on Ming-Dao’s part,  Ming-Dao is naturally outgoing, and his interest shown is gradually reciprocated by the shy Jia-Jen.
   
  
• Jia-Chien finds herself attracted to Li Kai (Winston Chao) a handsome and suave new manager at her airline company.  It looks like they are certain to become lovers, but at the last minute she learns that Li Kai was the man who broke Jia-Jen’s heart nine years ago.  So Jia-Chen has to call things off with Li Kai.  About this time Jia-Chen also learns that Raymond has chosen to break off his relationship with Jia-Chen and get married to another woman.  So now for the time being at least, Jia-Chen is bereft of lovers and “alone”.
   
  
• Jia-Ning’s close friend and coworker at Wendy’s, Rachel (Yu Chen), appears to be in the process of dumping her heartbroken boyfriend Guo Lun (Chao-jung Chen), and knowing that Guo Lun will always be waiting for her outside of Wendy’s after work, she asks Jia-Ning to shoo the lovesick boy away.  But Jia-Ning’s sympathetic encounters with Guo Lun soon lead to a mutual attraction between the two.  It turns out later that Rachel was only toying with her boyfriend and didn’t want to lose him, but her turnaround is too late.
   
  
• Lao Chu does not appear to be looking for any romantic liaisons, but his three daughters worry that he must do so or he will wind up lonely once the daughters eventually all leave home and attend to their private lives.  Lao Chu’s isolation is only worsened when his longtime friend and confidante, Lao Wen, suddenly dies of a heart attack.  But when the daughters learn that their friend Liang Jin-Rong’s widowed mother, Madame Liang (Ah-Lei Gua), has just returned to Taipei from overseas and is now sometimes socializing with Lao Chu, they optimistically assume that, even though the woman appears to be pushy and overbearing, she would be a suitable marriage partner for their father.  However, Lao Chu devotes most of his attention to affectionately spoiling Liang Jin-Rong’s young six-year-old daughter, Shan-Shan (Yu-Chien Tang), by secretly making the girl tasty lunches to take to school every day.  For Shan-Shan, Lao Chu is like a substitute daddy.
  

Finally, mostly at Sunday dinner confessions, the viewer learns how these relationships have turned out.  Jia-Ning announces that she is leaving home to marry her secret lover, Guo Lun, by whom she is already pregnant.  Jia-Jen marries Ming-Dao and even gets him to convert to Christianity.  

But most shocking of all is what happens with Lao Chu.  At a family dinner to which the Liang family (Madame Liang, Liang Jin-Rong, and Shan-Shan) have been invited, Lao Chu makes a marriage proposal not to the one everyone expects – Madame Liang, but to Jin-Rong, with whom Lao Chu has been having a secret affair.  This explains why Lao Chu has been showering Shan-Shan with paternal affection for awhile.  And it also means that the daughters will not be abandoning their father to loneliness.

So romantic love appears to have conquered all, and, in particular, to have overshadowed traditional family mores.  Is that the film’s final message?  Not entirely [6].  Jia-Chen, the most glamorous and attractive of the three sisters, was always the one who was least affected by traditional values.  She always found her father and his Sunday dinners insufferable, and she was the first daughter to announce her plans to move out of the family home.  But by the end of the film, she has changed.  She abandons her affair with Li Kai out of concerns for her older sister’s feelings.  And she declines a promotion from her airline company to be an overseas vice president, because she wants to stay closer to her family.  In the final scene she is shown cooking a meal for her father at the old home and showing hitherto unseen warmth for him.  So traditional family values now apparently have meaning for her.
 

Consequently we can say that what we have here is not just a battle between Modernism and Tradition or between East and West.  Overall, what makes this a great film is the display of subtle and complex interacting feelings presented by the main character actors.  My favorite performance was that of Kuei-Mei Yang as Jia-Jen, but they are all compelling, and you may have another favorite.

Also outstanding is the cinematography.  There are many emotive closeups that help convey the feelings in this story.  I would also like to call your attention to three extended tracking shots that I thought were very effective.  One is a two-minute shot showing an early conversation between Jia-Ning and Guo Lun.  A second is s 90-second shot of a conversation between Jia-Jen and Liang Jin Rong.  And a third sequence that lingers in my memory is a two-minute shot of Jia-Jen and Li Kai conversing while walking through a store.

So getting back to Lao Chu’s question that he asked early on in the film,

“Eat drink man woman.  Food sex . . . Is that all there is?”

We can say that the film’s response is,

“No, there is much more.  And it all comes from love in all its various guises and modes.”  

Love can be manifest in both traditional and modern circumstances.  The key thing is that, no  matter what the situation, love represents the most sincere and authentic aspects of who we are.  And this is what Ang Lee’s Eat Drink Man Woman puts on display for us.

★★★★

Notes:

1. Hal Hinson, "‘Eat Drink Man Woman’", Washington Post (19 August 1994).   
   
2. Desson Howe, "‘Eat Drink Man Woman’", Washington Post, (19 October 1994).   
   
3. Marjorie Baumgarten, “Eat Drink Man Woman”, Austin Chronicle, (19 August 1994).  
   
4. Janet Maslin, “FILM REVIEW; Avoiding Basic Human Desires, or Trying To”, “The New York Times”, (3 August 1994).   
   
5. Norman N. Holland, “Ang Lee, ‘Eat Drink Man Woman’ (1994)”, A Sharper Focus, (n.d.).   
   
6. David Sorfa, “Eat Drink Man Woman: Summary & Analysis”, Jotted Lines, (23 February 2020).   
   

“Lust, Caution” - Ang Lee (2007)

Ang Lee’s” tense drama Lust, Caution (Sè, Jiè, 2007) has drawn a variety of critical responses.  Indeed the film encompasses a number of topics and styles – history, politics, romance, erotica, psychology, etc. – and these can generate different reactions on various levels.  This film about some Chinese resistance efforts during the devastating Second Sino-Japanese War (1937-1945) is based on Eileen Chang’s moving novella Lust, Caution (1979) [1], which is equally multi-faceted.  Eileen Chang (aka Zhang Ailing), who is one of my favorite authors, lived in Hong Kong and Shanghai during this hectic war period that led to the deaths of millions [2], and her writing reflects on how those circumstances impinged on human consciousness.  And in this connection, I also recommend for your reading her famous story “Love in a Fallen City” (“Qing Cheng Zhi Lia”, 1943).

The story of Lust, Caution focuses on a young woman who is recruited to join a Chinese resistance plot to assassinate a high figure in the Chinese puppet government working for the occupying Japanese.  It is her job to seduce the assassination target and lure him to a place free from his security guards where he can be murdered.  Along the way, we get a glimpse into the complexity of her feelings as they evolve over the course of the plot.

Lee’s film follows the basic elements of Chang’s story closely, but in order to provide more background for the plot, it expands on the earlier conspiratorial elements of the plotters, and this occupies much of the first half of the film.  In general, Lee seems to be trying to evoke the psychological mood of Chang’s story, but he pursues his quest with different, more visual, means.  This led to some critics, particularly in the US, complaining that the film was too slow (it runs more than two-and-a-half hours) before it reaches its disturbing denouement.  In addition, Lee introduced some viscerally graphic violent sequences that were not part of Chang’s more internally focused tale.  These scenes include a horrifically bloody murder of a Chinese collaborator with the Japanese, as well as some very explicit and aggressive sexual scenes involving the two principal characters.  The explicit sex scenes attracted (or distracted) a lot of the public’s attention and led to the film being rated NC-17 (adults only) in the United States. In my view these graphic scenes were perhaps over-cooked, but they do contribute to the overall conflicting moods of the story.

Nevertheless, and despite the various critical misgivings about the film, Lust, Caution won the Golden Lion for best film at the 2007 Venice Film Festival and was a big hit worldwide, particularly in Asia.  This is because in my view the film moodily captures the evolving and conflicting feelings of its main characters. 

The success of this telling is heavily dependent on the film’s well-crafted production values. In particular the cinematography of Rodrigo Prieto maintains intimacy by using extensive closeups of the main characters.  Besides showing the subtle emotive states of these characters, this evokes an almost claustrophobic feeling of confinement that seems to constrain the autonomy of these figures.  This effort of cinematic confinement is on several occasions carried to far, though, as Prieto’s camera, holding to closeup compositions, sometimes nervously pans around the room following random movements of various characters.  This agitated panning doesn’t work, because there is no narrative perspective for the shots, i.e. the narrative “unseen witness” of the camera is not appropriately motivated. Nevertheless, the overall atmosphere of environmental confinement is effectively evoked. 

Another key production element is the musical score by multiple award-winning composer Alexandre Desplat. This unobtrusively creates just the right emotional tone for the film’s evolving mood.

A third key production component concerns the acting performances of the film’s two leads –  Wei Tang and Tony Chiu-Wai Leung.  Much of the time they convey their feelings not through words but through expressive reaction shots that seem to convey rising sentiments and evolving, sometimes hesitantly, held affections.  And both of these performances are excellent.  Wei Tang was a relative newcomer, but Tony Leung’s expressive reticence has long highlighted the Hong Kong film scene, notably in Days of Being Wild (1990). Chungking Express (1994), Ashes of Time (1994), Happy Together (1997), In the Mood for Love (2000), Hero (2002), and 2046 (2004).

There are several key thematic elements in the film, but one of the most important ones is that of role-playing.  We are all constantly being cast into multiple, parallel narratives in our lives involving multiple roles, and these multiple roles overlap in our inner selves and collectively affect who we are.  For example the character Wong Chia Chi (played by Wei Tang) plays the following distinct roles:

• College Student.
  In the beginning she is just “herself”, a teenager who moves from Japanese-occupied Shanghai to Hong Kong and enters college there.
   
• Member of Subversive Resistance Cell.
  Subsequently Wong Chia Chi becomes a member of a secret resistance group working to kill high-level figures who work for the Japanese occupiers.
   
• Socialite Housewife. 
  As a subversive agent, she masquerades as Mak Tai Tai (Mrs. Mak), the wife of an imaginary wealthy businessman Mr. Mak, so that she can join the social circle of Yee Tai Tai, the wife of her assassination target.
   
• Secret Lover. 
  Once she meets her targeted victim, Mr. Yee, she commences a clandestine sexual affair with the man, which of course must be kept secret from everybody.

We see Wong Chia Chi move between the separate roles and the cumulative effect these various masks have on her.  Mr. Yee (Tony Leung) has his multiple roles, too – Chinese government official, agent for the Japanese invaders, husband, and secret extra-marital lover.

The story of Lust, Caution passes through four stages, the first of which is actually a foreshadowed segment of the last.

1.  Japanese-occupied Shanghai, 1942

The first stage shows scenes that will only become clear later.  Mak Tai Tai (Wei Tang) is shown playing mahjong at the home of Yee Tai Tai (Joan Chen) and some other members of the hostess’s well-to-do social circle.  Yee Tai Tai’s husband, Mr. Yee (Tony Leung), shows up, and he appears to exchange a momentary meaningful glance with Mak Tai Tai.  She then excuses herself from the game and goes outside into a restaurant in town, where she makes an obscure telephone call to some armed people who are evidently preparing themselves for a murderous mission.  What all this means will only become clear near the end of the film.

2.  Shanghai - Hong Kong, 1938

The film now moves to a flashback four years earlier.  The Japanese have taken over Shanghai, and the people there are suffering under the suddenly destitute conditions.  A young woman, Wong Chia Chi (Wei Tang) makes it to war-free Hong Kong and enrols in a university there as a drama student.  She quickly joins a theater group headed by a charismatic young director, Kuang Yu Min (Leehom Wang), who is a passionate Chinese patriot.  After staging a successful patriotic play starring Wong Chia Chi, Kuang reveals to his theater group his more ambitious and radical ambition – to recruit them into forming an underground resistance group that will assassinate high-level Chinese collaborators of the Japanese.  Their first target will be Mr. Yee (Tony Leung), who works in Hong Kong as an agent for the Chinese puppet government that is overseen by the Japanese in occupied China. 

Because of Wong Chia Chi’s beauty and acting talents, she is setup to be the married seductress, Mak Tai Tai, who is to get to know Mrs. Yee and then ultimately lure Mr. Yee into a place where he will be unaccompanied by his bodyguards.  Wong Chia Chi’s commitment to her cause is tested when she learns that her lack of sexual experience will have to be corrected by having some training “practice” with one of her more experienced co-conspirators. 

In the event, their murder plan almost works, but it has to be called off at the last minute.  The resistance group then quickly learns that Yee has been transferred to Shanghai, and their assassination plans have to be abandoned.

At this point in the film, there is a bloody encounter with Tsao, a Chinese Japan-collaborationist who had earlier introduced Kuang Yu Min to Mr. Yee and who has now discovered that Kuang and his mates were not who they claimed to be.  This confrontation results in Tsao’s violent death at the hands of Kuang and his group, and afterwards they have to disband and go their separate ways.  It is a horrifically gory scene full of blood, and it was not part of Eileen Chang’s original story.  Although it does add additional gritty reality to the conspirators’ passionate commitment to their cause, I don’t believe Lee’s insertion of this material was necessary or effective.  Nevertheless, the film’s other virtues are enough to compensate for this defect. 

3.  Shanghai, 1942

The scene now shifts ahead several years to the Shanghai setting seen in the film’s opening stage.  Wong Chia Chi has returned from Hong Kong, and on the street she happens to run into Kuang Yu Min, who informs her that he has moved to Shanghai and is now a secret agent for the Kuomintang (Nationalist Chinese) government still ruling the China that is unoccupied.  Kuang has always seemed to have an unspoken romantic interest in Wong, but circumstances have always gotten in the way of their taking things further.  When they connect again this time, Kuang tells her that he is still intent on assassinating Mr. Yee, who he tells her is now head of the puppet government’s secret police.  Kuang reassembles his assassination team, and again Wong Chia Chi is recruited as the seductress of Mr. Yee. 

In short order Wong Chia Chi resumes her former fake identity as Mak Tai Tai, and she is reintroduced to Mrs. Yee’s social circle.  She also resumes her clandestine relationship with Mr. Yee, and now it becomes more serious.  They are soon engaging in intense sexual trysts which seem only to serve the physical lusts of the two participants. 

For his part Yee seems almost to be a sadistic misogynist, but Wong, herself, also indulges in her role as a lustful prostitute to the hilt.  These explicit and extended scenes embellish Chang’s story, and they have attracted much attention.  But they do fit into the overall narrative themes of Lee’s film.  As Wong engages in what is initially just purely deceptive role-playing, her self-satisfying lustful pleasures seem to leak over into and overlap with her other personae. She starts developing real feelings for Yee.  On one occasion Wong soulfully sings and dances a love song for Yee, and this elicits tears from the usually poker-faced Yee.  What was initially just self-gratification is now turning to real attachment.

4.  Conclusion

The film now moves to scenes that encompass what was shown at the beginning of the film – the planned assassination attempt on Mr. Yee.  Yee and Wong are privately visiting a jeweler from whom Yee is purchasing a large diamond for Wong.  At the last moment, Wong, almost as if she is listening to a hidden voice inside her, quietly warns Yee to run away, and the ever-cautious Yee takes heed and flees the scene.  This leads to the tragic finale depicting the obliteration of Wong and her resistance colleagues.


One might say that there are two main themes that underlie Lust, Caution.  One concerns the provocative notion that physical lust can, thanks to the way our compartmentalized inner personae overlap with each other, lead to personal intimacy.  This is the opposite of the way things are conventionally supposed to evolve, where growing personal intimacy can gradually lead to physical (i.e. sexual) intimacy. In Lust, Caution this reverse direction of lust –> personal intimacy is what has been most conspicuous to the public and has attracted the most critical attention.

But it is another, more general, theme that I find even more compelling, and that one concerns the way we make efforts to compartmentalize our private personae so that they can operate freely within the scope of separate partitioned narratives.  Yee was obsessed with the need for secrecy – the need to protect his separate narratives from having any contact with each other.  Wong Chia Chi, for her part, also tried to keep her inner personae separate, but in the end her authentic self asserted itself and invoked a more unified sense of who she was.  For this she paid the highest price.  But if we think about our basic existential goals in life, isn’t this what we ultimately live for?

So although the lust theme attracted the most media attention, it is the caution theme that is the more fascinating. And it is under its spell that we are drawn into Ang Lee’s vision of Eileen Chang’s moody and fatalistic story of existential confinement and release. 
★★★½

Notes:

1. Eileen Chang (Zhang Ailing), Lust, Caution, (1979), Anchor Books, Random House (2007).
2. “Second Sino-Japanese War”, New World Encyclopedia, (26 August 2015).   

Ang Lee

Films of Ang Lee:

• Eat Drink Man Woman - Ang Lee (1994)
• Lust, Caution - Ang Lee (2007) 
• Life of Pi - Ang Lee (2012) 

“Life of Pi” - Ang Lee (2012)

Everyone seems to love Ang Lee’s Life of Pi (2012), based on the 2002 Man Booker Prize winning novel by Yann Martel.  Well, almost everyone. Since the novel is a philosophical fantasy about a lone teenage boy on a lifeboat, it would seem to be almost unfilmable.  Yet Lee’s film was immediately acclaimed as a masterpiece and nominated for eleven US awards, including Best Picture. Certainly on the cinematography level, the film is a marvel – as one watches, one can’t help wondering, “how did they do it?” Nevertheless, I have my reservations concerning the ultimate merit of this work as an effective film narrative, and I think it pales in comparison to Lee's wonderful Eat Drink Man Woman (1994).

The narrative structure of the film is somewhat complex, and this accounts for part of the film’s popularity.  At the outer level, the film itself has an implicit narrator, the filmmaker, who is telling us a story by visual means.  Then within that narrative we have the character of the Writer, who is evidently telling us the story of his encounter with Piscine “Pi” Patel, who survived a shipwreck and is now a Canadian academic in theology.  Then within the Writer’s narrative are two conflicting narratives by Patel about the same events, the “Animal” story and the “Human story”.  The Writer and the viewer are then forced to choose which of the two stories by the unreliable narrator Patel is more believable.  So the outline of the story proceeds as follows:

1.  The Writer Meets Pi
A successful novelist, the “Writer”, wishes to interview Piscine “Pi” Patel, an academic in Toronto, because the Writer has been told that Patel has an amazing and true story that will help him believe in God.  Patel is known to have miraculously survived a shipwreck years ago, and it this experience that constitutes Pi Patel’s story.

2.  Pi’s Upbringing
In a somewhat desultory fashion, Pi begins to recount his upbringing in India, where his father owned a zoo in Pondicherry.  The main items covered are how Patel acquired his name, “Pi”, and how a Bengal tiger in the family zoo came to be called, “Richard Parker”. He also relates his growing fascination with religious truth.  Even though from a middle class Indian family and with a father who was a rational humanist and discounted religion, Pi embraced traditional Hinduism and its ethical precepts. But Pi subsequently converted to Christianity and then to Islam. Each time he converted, he did not renounce his previous religious affiliations, but apparently embraced additional truths offered by the newly adopted faith.

When Pi is about sixteen years old, his father sells the zoo in Pondicherry and loads his family and animals onto a ship headed for Canada.  Somewhere across the Atlantic Ocean, however, the ship encounters a heavy storm and founders.  At this point one enters the “Animal” story.

3.  The Animal Story
Most of the film’s running time is occupied with relating what happens in Pi’s “Animal” story.  Almost everything is dramatized in this section, and Pi’s explicit narration recedes from the viewer’s focus. 

In the chaos of the sinking ship, Pi alone winds up in a lifeboat, along with some animals who accidentally fall into the lifeboat, too.  These turn out to be a zebra, a hyena, an orangutan, and the tiger Richard Parker.  The rest of the ship, crew, and passengers go down.  On the lifeboat the hyena soon kills and eats from both the zebra and the orangutan before suffering a similar fate from the tiger.  The rest of this part of the story concerns how Pi manages to coexist with his lethal feline shipmate, Richard Parker.

Eventually the lifeboat makes it to a mysterious floating island featuring a vast horde of meerkats. This appears to be a safe haven with an abundant food supply for Pi and Richard Parker, but they both discover that they are inhabitants of an island that is a huge carnivorous plant that may at some point eat and digest them. So they get back into the lifeboat and eventually make it to Mexico, where Pi is finally returned to civilization and Richard Parker disappears into the forest.

4.  The Human Story
Noone, including the authorities, believed Pi’s fantastic story about living 227 days on a lifeboat with a tiger, so he tells the Writer that he gave the authorities an alternative story about his lifeboat experience.  This story, which is told to the Writer in words rather than being dramatized, involves not animals on the lifeboat but three human companions, several of whom (and ultimately Pi, himself) engage in murder and cannibalism in order to survive.

So the Writer and the viewer must choose which story to believe.  Both stories seem implausible.  The "Animal" story suggests that a person could rise to the implausible heights of taming a tiger; while the "Human" story suggest that people could readily descend to implausible depths of bestiality. In any case, as we know, the most important stories we tell are those that we tell to ourselves. Pi asks the Writer which of the two conflicting stories he wants to believe, and the writer says he prefers the “Animal” story. Pi responds by saying, “and so it goes with God.”  This is presumably the philosophical message of the film.

OK, it is a challenging thought, but I will outline why I don’t think this film really amounts to what its supporters claim.  There are two basic problem areas with respect to Life of Pi: the narrative, itself, and the philosophical implications concerning what is shown.

Narrative Issues
Despite the spectacular mise-en-scene carried out by Lee, the fundamental problem with Life of Pi is that the narrative core to the film, the “Animal Story”, is one long shaggy dog story [1]. The interaction between Pi and the tiger Richard Parker doesn’t evolve into a relationship. We can perhaps accept certain aspects of it by imagining that the tiger becomes exhausted from hunger and becomes more familiar with the other “animal” on board, but we really don’t have any idea of how a tiger thinks or feels.  There is a conflict here in terms of narrative presentation, because by Lee’s real and physical depiction of the tiger, he sacrifices the metaphorical insinuation that some sort of relationship is evolving.  Now one might possibly counter by arguing that everything is going on inside Pi’s head and that he is “taming the tiger within”.  But what is shown onscreen is the direct interaction between the tiger and Pi, and that has to work as a narrative.  Instead, the viewer’s interest is more occupied by what is really a distraction – how did they film this thing?

Interesting narratives must evolve, usually by means of changing attitudes among key personages in the story.  But the viewer of Life of Pi cannot understand the motivations of Richard Parker, the hyena, or the orangutan – motivations which are essential for a narrative to hold our attention. So we are only left with Pi’s experiences.  Moreover, although the performance of Suraj Sharma as the 16-year-old Pi shows a certain sensitivity, he many times seems entirely too calm for a boy going through such horrific catastrophes and ordeals.  So even with Pi, it is difficult to get a feel for his motivations and what is going on inside his mind.

A further complaint that I have about the narrative is the decision to have the Writer articulate the explicit correspondences between the “Animal” story and the “Human” story.  This connection should have been left to the viewer to make, and it makes the story structure even more artificial and explicitly schematic.

Philosophical Issues
But there is still the philosophical side of things to consider.  Can the issue of “and so it goes for God” make up for the shortcomings of the film’s narrative presentation?  Again, I feel the film falls somewhat short along several lines.

• Taming the Tiger Within.  If the “Animal” story is to be taken allegorically, then we might consider Pi’s relationship with, indeed identification with, the tiger (Richard Parker) as his attempt to tame the tiger within himself.  He says that his preoccupation with Richard Parker is what enabled him to survive.  But what he ultimately arrived at was merely a form of peaceful coexistence with the tiger. Originally a devout Hindu and therefore a vegetarian, he compromises his ethical values and eats animal flesh, and thus gives in to being part tiger. This wasn’t truly a taming, and it doesn’t bring Pi closer to God, even if it did help him to survive on the material plane.
   
• Moral Condemnation.  By seeing his lifeboat shipmates as animals instead of humans, Pi could avoid the feeling of disgust and moral condemnation he had towards cannibalism. This altered perspective might make Pi more sympathetic, but it would also lower his companions from the status of morally responsible sentient beings to that of beasts.  Rather than holding the compassionate vision that all sentient beings, including animals, are higher souls, this reductive re-perspective operates in the reverse direction. It is true that this has the advantage of removing his shipmates from moral condemnation and therefore utter rejection, but it also makes them lesser beings and consequently eatable – a compromise that is also not exactly godlike. 
   
• The Carnivorous Floating Island.  In the “Human” story there is no episode that corresponds to the carnivorous floating island of the “Animal” story.  We might fill in this gap and guess that when Pi first returned to the civilized world in the “Human” narrative, he was still accompanied by the tiger within and was still participating in a seemingly civilized world that masked its underlying carnivorous nature. So he presumably had to make an additional escape, this time to a more humane world in order to find a harmonious existence.  This is a point worth making, but it seems to have been dropped from the film and therefore leaves an unfilled gap.

Ultimately, the film suggests to us that all religions have a story and that we should adopt the one that “works” best for us, i.e. the one that contributes most effectively to our survival.  This strikes me as a utilitarian prescription and is not something that elicits the feelings of loving compassion.  Pi was a sensitive, loving boy when he was a teenager.  The older Pi who narrates the story is living a comfortable life; but he seems not to have the same spark of caring engagement, and I don't think he is closer to God now.  We need to do go beyond just taming the tiger within – we need to evoke the loving and compassionate heavenly being within.  Then we will be closer to God.

★★

Notes:

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shaggy_dog_story