Three tasty shorts. The lunch is from a female Tiger winner, but the breakfast and dinner are also top-notch. However, there is an aftertaste, because these are three refined recipes for ending a relationship. A dinner can also be very unromantic.
This film trilogy by female Asian directors focuses on love. The stories from China (Wang), Thailand (Suwichakornpong) and Singapore (Cai) are varied in tone, but all concentrate on mealtimes. Also, all the female protagonists are called Mei, we keep hearing ‘Who wants to marry me?’ and in the background we hear the news of the murder of Benazir Bhutto, the former Prime Minister of Pakistan.
A young woman and her boyfriend have breakfast. She is visiting him in Nanjing. While they roam around, they discuss their mutual past and the future. The lunch is lighter in tone: two teenagers discuss life and love, bored as only teenagers can be. The dinner is in Singapore. In this melancholy story, a man looks for love and a lonely old woman reflects on her past.
The stories reflect the complexity and beauty of love, seen from various Asian perspectives. Restrained, controlled and sensitive.
Programmer Note by Gertjan Zuilhof:
A film (or three films) that intuitively questions the vulnerability of a romance (after all it could end) and is presented in a form which questions itself.
The form: three female directors each tell a brief story which, together constitutes three stories, of course, but is also intended to be more than the sum of its parts. As far I am concerned, this has succeeded. Particularly because the directors are not only women, but are all directors of above average ability as well.
Could the film have been done differently? What if one of the directors had told all three stories? For example, the best of the three. Would that have been better? I don't think so. Perhaps it would have resulted in a single film, instead of three parts of a film, but it would have lacked the differences in tone that make the parts so particularly appealing, in the same way that a good meal also consists of various dishes.
Would it have worked with three male directors? In principle, but the searching, sensing and hesitant storytelling that suits doubts about love so well, might possibly also have been lost. Perhaps more emotion, aggression, passion and eroticism would have been added, but whether that would have improved the film is far from certain.
So the simple act of asking three female directors to tell a not-so-sweet love story proved to be the right thing to do.