A very good movie

Ang Lee is definitely one of the most versatile and simply one of the best directors at work nowadays and the fact that the guy still hasn’t won the Best Picture Academy Award is one of those big mysteries (he still managed to win twice the Academy Award for the Best Director for ‘Life of Pi’ and ‘Brokeback Mountain’). Personally, I was lucky enough to follow this director right from the start and, after hearing so many good things about ‘Xi yan’, I went to see his 3rd directing effort in the movie theater when it was released. Eventually, since it was already more than 20 years old, I was really eager to check it out again and I was once again quite impressed. First of all, in this movie, you get to see the best cooking scenes ever filmed, at least, that's my opinion. But, of course, it went beyond that. Basically, Ang Lee took some elements from his first movie 'Tui shou' (for example, Sihung Lung was playing the lead and a rather similar character in both movies) but he really managed to develop more the characters this time around. Futhermore, even though the story was more complex with more sub-storylines, he also managed to make them all work and the end-result was quite spellbinding to behold. To conclude, even though it is rather forgotten, it is actually one of my favorite movies from this director, in fact, I think it is even one of the best romantic-comedies ever made and it is definitely worth a look. 

8/10