Opening Shot
A truly great director is capable of subtly foreshadowing to the audience everything that the film is really about in the opening scene of a movie. Those directors who attain the height of brilliance can do this with a single opening shot. Such is the case with what is genuinely only an opening shot and not really a scene at all in this film. The film fades in a street intersection in which cars and trucks going in both directions horizontally before an opening is created into which a veritable army of scooters begins to approach the camera along the vertical. In a matter of mere seconds the center of the screen is overflowing with scooters in motion while a line of cars and trucks remains virtually motionless in the background. Scooters are associated with the younger generation while the gas-guzzling vehicles requiring four wheels or more are associated with the older generation and the past. Eventually, the shot fades out as both once share the boulevard, but scooters still dominate. This imagery foreshadows the film’s thematic exploration of the generation gap between young and old, modern and traditional, children and parents.
The Opening Scene
It will turn out that the film is not really all that concentrated or concerned with vehicular transportation. This is one reason why the opening shot is just in addition to the literal fact that it is comprised of just one short shot. By contrast, the actual opening “scene” of the film is constructed through careful editing of multiple of shots connecting together to present the protagonist preparing a meal. Meal preparation will prove to be far more important than either scooters or cars and the focus upon the precision of the older chef as goes about preparing this meal becomes imagery that also speaks to the generational divide while at the same becoming the film’s first commentary upon the social significant of the “eat” part of the title. The opening scene is steadfast in it presentation that actually preparing a meal means a lot more than what most people living in the modern world consider it to be in their kitchen increasingly dominated by machines built expressly for the purpose of drastically reducing the time it takes to make food edible.
Wendy’s
The long, slow, careful and precise editing of the opening scene of careful preparation of a meal by a single chef in the singularly controlled environment of his kitchen is immediately juxtaposed with the frantic scenes inside a Wendy’s fast food restaurant. The first—indeed the only—cooking appliance the audience is shown is basket of potatoes being dipped into a vat of boiling oil for the purpose of making French fries in a matter of minutes. The female employee moves from the deep fryer to pick up a drink container before pivoting to attend to the cash register and a throng of customers lined up on the other side of the counter. This imagery give us the young in comparison to the old and the modern in comparison to the traditional and an act barely qualifying as cooking compared to the tender loving care we have just witnessed in the kitchen of the old man. Notable, an obviously American customer rudely pushes his way through the throng to complain that he ordered a chicken sandwich only to be told “that is chicken.” The film is not yet ten minutes old by this point and already the director has presented three different examples of visual imagery which become a testament to the thematic exploration he has in mind for the audience.
Man, Woman.
We have seen preparations for eating and we have seen a cup filled with a dark sugary beverage for drinking. We have even seen scooters! Before the first ten minutes are full used up, however, the director also manages to slip in imagery which informs of the other parts of the title offering the suggestion of sexuality. A shirtless man bring a woman sitting on a bed a glass of water. A quick cut shows them both together sitting on the bed, viewed only from the necks up and the imagery is such that they really appear less as two distinct individuals two heads sharing one body. The dialogue is allusive at best, indicating a subversion of the traditional romantic coupling while also indicating that it has been an extended and complicated relationship. Convention battles against rebellion though it is not explicitly explained in detail what is going on. What makes this scene especially interesting, however, is that it is bookended at is beginning and end with a quick return of a single shot of the old man still going about his meal preparations but without the context of the opening scene.
