The Chinese Feast

A cooking comedy set in Hong Kong. Sun wants out of a gang. He is going to Canada and plans to work as a cook there, because the girl he loves is there. He fails the test. He knows nothing about a kitchen and takes a job at a restaurant to learn. The restaurant is doing badly. The rival across the street has taken every customer and the owner's daughter is trying to save the place. A competition is announced. The losing restaurant will close. They look likely to lose. So they go looking for an old cook. Liu was the best years ago. Now he drinks, his hands shake, and he will not enter a kitchen. From there the film is a story of training. Knife work, fire, smell, choosing ingredients and patience. The subject of the competition is an imperial banquet. A historical arrangement of hundreds of dishes, with each team making parts of it. What the narrative is interested in is not food but the passing on of mastery: the film's real concern is how a craft is handed over. The cooking scenes are exaggerated. The narrative cuts cooking like a fight sequence; fast editing, slow motion and music. The humour is broad. The jokes are sometimes physical, sometimes complete nonsense, and the film does not try to balance it. The emotional line lies in the cook's past. Why Liu stopped becomes clear at the end and changes the tone at a stroke. Leslie Cheung, Anita Yuen, Law Kar-ying and Kenny Bee are in the cast. Tsui Hark directed. Who it is for: anyone who likes 1990s Hong Kong comedy and films about food. Who it is not for: anyone looking for a consistent tone; the narrative wanders constantly between melodrama and slapstick.