These two week I watched two different love movies, Blue Velvet and Eat Drink Man Woman.

Blue Velvet is one of David Lynch’s most celebrated works of his early years. And the special style of surprise, horror, darkness, distortion and violence is fully revealed in this film. Blue Velvet is set in an ordinary American town. This town is sunny and vibrant during the day. Every report in the broadcast is positive and delightful. Every resident is friendly and smiley. In such a calm and beautiful town, there are a lot of hidden sins and crimes. The prelude begins when college student Jeffrey goes home to take care of his father and finds a cut ear in the grass. Based on the cut ear, Jeffrey and Sheriff’s daughter, Sandy, began an investigation and gradually discovered the secret between a female singer who was abused and threatened in an apartment and a group of gangsters who deal drugs. Sexual abuse, violence, murder are hidden under the calm appearance of the town. After the night falls, the world becomes totally different from what is in the day. This is the twisted dark world that Blue Velvet portrays for us.

Blue Velvet is a jaw-dropping film. When the film was shot, it immediately received two opposite voices from the public. Some people were obsessed with it, but the opponents criticized it. Although many people laughed and despised when the film when it was released, saying it was an extreme, black, vulgar and disgusting work. Nevertheless, Blue Velvet earned Lynch his second Academy Award nomination for Best Director, and came to achieve cults status.

It describes the sexuality, violence, and crime hidden in the calm appearance of a typical American town in the mid-1980s. The director used bright colors to express the turbulent undercurrents of the seemingly normal life of American middle class. The two male main characters are a metaphor for two distinct poles in each person’s life: bright and dark, normal and abnormal, good and evil. In some aspects, this film can be seen as a psychological film.

Lynch used a lot of psychological principles to make the whole movie look more fascinating and appealing. For example, a series of enclosed spaces, especially the deepest and largest enclosed space —- the endless night. In addition, the color using of this film is very bold and outstanding. The use of blue has deepened a mysterious atmosphere, and the large use of red enhances another wild sexual suggestion and degenerate atmosphere. The gangster thugs in the movie are almost like a group of perverts. Among them, Frank’s Oedipus complex is very serious. Henry Miller once wrote, “To a large extent, our pain stems from the failure to see the world as a huge uterus.” Jamie Russell points out “What makes “Blue Velvet” so special, though, is the way in which Lynch turns This simple set-up into a psychosexual drama that would make even Freud shake his head in disbelief.

This is a manifestation of David Lynch’s “Lynchism”, which uses “Floyd’s theory” to explain dreams and reality, sex and life. It is more about expressing the director’s seemingly calm l world and the other side of rational humanity, which is like uncovering the graceful blue velvet curtains, what hides behind are evil and sins. After watching this movie, my strongest feeling is that I seems like making a thrilling daydream. Like the curious Jeffrey, we accidentally fell into the abyss of nightmares.

The film is unconventional, not only in the objective audience but also in the way of directing. It is destined to be a film that  cannot cater to the tastes of the public. However, there are some conventional features in the plot setting. Jamie Russell mentions, “What distinguishes “Blue Velvet” from Lynch’s other films is its reliance on a conventional plot. It’s the only one of Lynch’s works to marry his nightmarish concerns to a story that (very nearly) makes sense, and the result Is a movie that brought the clammy terrors of this avant-garde film maker kicking and screaming into the mainstream.”

“Eat Drink Man Woman” mainly tells the story of a father and his three daughters in a family in Taiwan in the 1990s. The characters appearing in the film all have their own unique and distinctive personality characteristics. The three daughters want to escape from the bondage of family. While the father Mr. Chu is unable to do anything to solve this situation. Ang Lee begins the movie with a weekend dinner that the family must have together every weekend night, and gradually spreads out the whole story. Every turning point in this film takes place at the dinner table, and the weekend gathering becomes the most crucial part of the plot setting of “Eat Drink Man Woman”. Winnie Khaw said that ”Food acts as a recurring symbol and hovers in the background for poignant family moments.” And I think that is why the process of making dinner is emphasized in this film.

Director Ang Lee said that “Everything is much different in Eat Drink Man Woman than the other films I’ve made. It has a bigger cast and a lot more complex story line… I started thinking about families and how they communicate. Sometimes the things children need to hear most are often the things that parents find hardest to say, and vice versa. When that happens, we resort to ritual. For the Chu family, the ritual is the Sunday dinner… At each dinner the family comes together and then something happens that pushes them farther apart.” He used a rich and delicate lens language to express the changing of the relationship among these four main characters, from inconsistency to harmony. This film shows us the most trivial things of ordinary Chinese people’s most comment diet, telling the audiences about what love is and what family is.

These two movies are totally different from each other. One is about the hiding sin of the world and humanity, but another one is about the love of family. What in comment is that both of these two movie are talking about love, different types of love.