It is the rare film that informs the audience of everything of its fundamental thematic premise in its opening shot. Most films tend to open with what is known as an establishing shot designed to let a viewer know something important about its setting or, in some cases, its main character. Christopher Nolan’s The Prestige is a terrific example of a short opening shot that lets you know a whole lot about what is to come in literally just a few seconds of film. True, the audience won’t have the slightest idea what all those hats on the ground mean until well into the story, but the imagery isn’t there to explain, it’s there to create wonder mixed ever so slightly with a sense of dislocation. And that, in a nutshell, describes everything that follows.
Ang Lee’s opening shot in Eat Drink Man Woman is so brilliant that one does not even need to consider the entirety of this very short shot. Just freeze-frame the minute the title appears and look at it. Take your time and really allow what is now just a photograph rather than a film settle into your mind. What is seen on the screen behind the title is simplicity itself. It is literally nothing but a lot of scooters, a handful of cars and a couple of trucks caught in the intersection after their traffic as just turned green. The first thing you may notice is the sheer number of scooters. Way too many to count quickly. On the other hand, a quick glimpse is all that is needed to count the number of trucks and one can assess the number of cars to within no more than one or two without even actually counting. This is not true of the scooters; at least not for most people. The scooters dominate and while not one single scooter shown is going to take us anywhere from this shot to the next, this domination is invaluable for analyzing the film because it really does tell the viewer a whole lot.
Eat Drink Man Woman can be said to cover a number of themes, but ultimately all those themes unify together into a great big knot known as generational conflict. It is a film with a simple title telling a story with a simple overarching premise: the old always has to make the way for the new, traditions will always crumble in the face of progressive change, and outdated is inevitably victimized by modernity. All the conflict and drama that goes on between the father and his daughters over the course this story conveyed thematically and symbolically in an opening shot that otherwise has nothing whatever to do with the story. This is not a shot of cars and scooters struggling for space on the road because it is going to reveal one of the main characters. These people are all faceless nobodies whose personal stories matter not one bit to that of anyone we will come to know. It is pure cinema in that it is an opening shot existing solely for the purpose of telling the audience, “pay attention here because this is going to wind up being important.”
The protagonist, the master chef Mr. Chu, is very close to becoming a relic of the past and this is most effectively portrayed in the juxtaposition of the tender loving care he puts into the meal he is making that covers much of the first ten minutes of the film and the rush to just get the food out while it’s hot that characterizes his daughter’s job in the food industry working at Wendy’s. Times have changed and with it so has time itself. People no longer have the patience to wait for a meal to be carefully prepared from scratch. Mr. Chu is a car and there are not as many like him left that matter to society as much as his daughter moving as fast as she can from kitchen pass-thru to deep fryer to soda dispenser to front counter. Jia-Ning is the most obvious representative of the world of the scooter in comparison to her father, but in truth all is daughters are scooters. What can a scooter do that a car can’t? Well, it can scoot for one thing; it can take off much quicker than a car and once it is in motion it can weave in and out of traffic in a way no car can possibly compete with.
The connection between the old-fashioned ways of the father and the faster-moving world of his daughters is made right from the beginning in that opening shot of a traffic light turning green and masses of vehicles taking off. Nothing is included to make it explicitly clearly why the film opens in this way and many viewers will probably not even remember that this is how the movie opens. Many viewers are surely expected to think back and convince themselves that the movie actually does open on Mr. Chu in his kitchen, laboring lovingly over preparing the meal. It makes sense, after all. But, no, that only comes after the short shot of traffic. A shot which qualifies as one of the greatest opening shots in film history.
