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And there's the first great thing about Dumplings: No spoiler alert is required there, because you'll basically know what's in those dumplings by the end of the opening credit sequence. Dumplings is an extraordinary horror film on many levels, and one of them is certainly the ways in which it eschews typical horror movie narrative structure. Where most scare flicks would spend half their length building to a reveal ("What's in those dumplings?!" some protagonist or other would shriek at some point), director Fruit Chan is after different, more deeply disturbing jolts. The plot of Dumplings is simple: Ching (Miriam Yeung) is a one-time television star anxious to regain her youth (she is best known for starring in a teen love story), especially once she finds out that her husband, Lee (Tony Leung Ka-fai), is having an affair. She begins visiting Aunt Mei (Bai Ling), who claims to be an expert in traditional Chinese medicine. Ching becomes almost a junkie, convinced that Aunt Mei's wonder dumplings are making her attractive once more to her husband (although initiating hot sex with him doesn't seem to hurt, either). Eventually, though, Mei's means of gathering her dumpling filling materials place her under suspicion, and she flees Hong Kong, leaving Ching in the lurch just as the dumplings seem to be exacting a vicious price on her. Dumplings began life as one third of the anthology film Three: Extremes (which itself was a sequel to the original Three), and although its simple plot would lead one to expect it would work better at the shorter length, it turns out to be even more powerful as a separate feature. Based on a novella by acclaimed writer Lillian Lee (who not only wrote Farewell, My Concubine, but also the fabulous Tsui Hark fantasy Green Snake), the writing is something well worth savoring, with richly developed characters and intriguing subplots. Dumplings is really about the modern fear of aging, and the casting of both lovely young pop star Miriam Yeung and sex-on-a-stick Chinese-American Bai Ling are as atypical for a horror film as the plot structure. Yeung, who in real life probably isn't even 30 yet, is not made up to look old or dowdy, and so we realize early on that her search for youth is really quite ridiculous; Hong Kong has recently become even more obsessed with appearance than the U.S., and Dumplingsis mocking that obsession in no uncertain terms. Director Fruit Chan's career up to this point has been as Hong Kong's king of the low-budget socially conscious drama; he's chronicled the lives of young tenement kids being sucked into triads (Made in Hong Kong), abused children (Little Cheung), mainland prostitutes seeking clients in Hong Kong (Durian, Durian), and even sanitation (Public Toilet). Dumplings, despite an obvious higher budget and the presence of several major stars, clearly continues Chan's interest in social issues, exploring not just the obsession with youth but also economic class (Ching is wealthy, while Aunt Mei is poor), underage pregnancy, gender politics, and the less-legitimate aspects of Chinese medicine (interestingly enough, the Hong Kong episode in the original Three also dealt with Chinese medicine). But Dumplings isn't just an odd social drama/horror flick hybrid, which might imply a certain level of art-house dullness. It's also entertaining, albeit in a squirmy, I-can't-believe-what-I'm-watching kind of way. Aside from the queasily realistic dumpling fillings and the fine script, it's also got a throbbing sexual layer, thanks largely to the performance of Bai Ling as Aunt Mei. Ling won virtually every acting award in Asia for this, and it's no wonder—Mei is one of the great antagonists of modern horror cinema. She's trashy, dressed in her skin-tight '60s-era capris and high heels, she's cunning, she's brash, she seems to possess at least some skill, and we may even believe her when she tells us she's much older than she looks (especially since her apartment seems to be a shrine to pre-Cultural Revolution China). You just know she's going to end up seducing Lee, and it's surprising that their relationship was completely omitted in the short version of Dumplings. The film also sets itself apart from the typical run-of-the-mill shocker by employing the world's greatest cinematographer (and I'll take on anyone who wants to challenge me on that statement), Christopher Doyle. Best known for his gorgeous, glowing work with Wong Kar-wai, Doyle makes every damn frame of Dumplings glow with saturated colors and off-center framing; you'll be gasping over the beauty of Miriam Yeung's skin even as you gag over the way the contents of the dumplings can be glimpsed just beneath the translucent dough. Doyle's camera also expertly captures the shocks—and believe me, Dumplings has a couple of those, too. I can't remember the last time I literally jumped out of my seat in a horror movie, but one shot of husband Lee's answer to his own search for youth caused me to leave a divot in the ceiling. Anyone looking for further proof that the world's best horror films are now coming from Asia need look no further than Dumplings. It's such a pleasure to see a horror movie made by and with adults, that's not presented as just another quickie product for consumption. Nope, this one's a sixteen-course feast by comparison. I already feel reinvigorated. (Note: Although Dumplings is scheduled for a U.S. theatrical release at some point, it can also be purchased on DVD from a number of online retailers, including yesasia.com and pokerindustries.com).
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Now, that concept of a "cult" movie is a very tricky thing, and, since as a professional cultural critic, I live by the creed "If someone else said it before you, it must be true," I want to explain what I mean by a cult film by quoting Umberto Eco. Eco (fans of The Da Vinci Code might have heard of him as a guy who writes about the kind of stuff that Dan Brown writes about, only with wit and purpose) once said about cult films: "I think that in order to transform a work into a cult object one must be able to break, dislocate, unhinge it so that one can remember only parts of it, irrespective of their original relationship with the whole." Dumplings, in this context, is one of the most breakable films to come down the pike in years. What the Hell is Dumplings? A horror movie, sure. But Lillian Lee's scalpel-precise-yet-chainsaw-brutal script is also: a character study; a film that uses the same middle-class woman's pressure points of anxiety that in the West we see exploited in Lifetime made-for-TV flicks; a pit-bull-to-the-genitals satire; a grotesque in the classic sense of the word (in which parodic subjects are exaggerated to the point of . . . well . . . grotesquery); a story of women's friendship that in the West would star Goldie Hawn and Diane Keaton (if you squint right, scenes from Dumplings could be spliced into Beaches without the seams showing). Crikey, Dumplings might even qualify as a musical, if certain moments of singing and recurring leitmotifs could be classified as "numbers." To give you an idea of the kind of amoeboid Rorschach blot that is Dumplings, an amoeboid-i-ness and Rorschach-i-ness that is due to the film's feverishly "breakable" nature . . . the scene that Lisa mentioned, the one that made her jump and leave a divot in the ceiling? That scene had me doubled over laughing myself sick, because it had such a brutal core of satire and the grotesque. Both are valid responses to the scene, just the same way that looking at the same inkblot, one person can see a puppy, while the other sees a duckling. That Dumplings can bitchslap out of two movie fiends such visceral, if opposite, responses is a testament to how deliciously diseased this flick is. Dumplings, as a bubbling cauldron of different elements, throws its audience into an "OMIGOD! WHAT THE HELL AM I WATCHING?" kind of trance that dovetails beautifully with the almost surreal mise en scène created by Chan and his cinematographer, Christopher Doyle, who is—no bullshit, Lisa is right—one of the greatest cinematographers ever, maybe the best since Geoffrey Unsworth. Doyle and Chan are unable to line-up an uninteresting or non-beautiful shot. It's one thing to look at a movie and say, "Hey, that's nice photography!" But the way Doyle works with his directors is unique, I think. The way Doyle shoots, and this may sound like hyperbole, but it's not, makes the photography central to the film's narrative. Doyle makes the progression of images, the use of colors, the framing of shots, as much the backbone of a movie as the script. Look at his work in Wong Kar Wai's 2046. Could that story have been told in the way it had to be told without . . . I dunno . . . Doyle's use of the colors red and green? The only cinematographer I can think of whose work is an integral to the flow of a movie the way that Doyle's is might be Luciano Tavoli, who can reign in and collaborate with insane geniuses like Michelangelo Antonioni and Dario Argento in ways that allow those nutjobs to produce their very finest work. That Doyle is now shooting Shyamalan's Lady in the Water gives me a tiny ray of hope for that flick. If it sounds like I'm exaggerating here, or if it sounds like I'm being a dickweed of a film critic, making up irrelevant bullshit so I sound all cinema savvy, let me just point out that the climax of Dumplings, the no-holds-barred emotional turning point of the narrative upon which all that came before and that comes after hinges, is shot by Doyle and Chan upwards through a glass mixing bowl. The shot doesn't distract from the climax. It's not a showy, "Hey, lookit me! I made a tableaux!" moment. It all makes a perversely artistic sense that only two guys as smart and brave as Chan and Doyle could pull off. No discussion of Dumplings is worth its dipping sauce without mention of Hollywood's scantily-clad-red-carpet-standard Bai Ling, or, for that matter, her co-star, Miriam Yeung. The mind-crunching subversiveness of casting thirty-ish squeaky clean pop star Miriam Yeung as a trophy wife and harridan-in-training is as sick and yummily twisted as, in a few years, casting Britney Spears as Mrs. Bates. And as for Bai Ling… well . . . before Dumplings, she'd never really done anything special for me. I'd just sit in the theater and say, "Hey! It's Bai Ling!" Her performance in Dumplings, mingling the sick, the twisted, the lunatic, the sexy, and the pervertedly endearing, is a career-defining role. Auntie Mei is a lovable snack-munching monster, dusted with gluten flour, surrounded by Maoist kitsch and wearing the kind of outfits that make her look like Hong Kong's answer to Johnny Bravo's spandex-wearing mom. She's banal, but in a horrifyingly loveable way. Bai Ling's Auntie Mei is one of the great sickos of horror cinema, and her performance alone would be worth the rental of Dumplings, even if the entire flick weren't staggeringly brilliant. The feature-length version of Dumplings is available in North America as a bonus disc included with the Lions Gate DVD of Three . . . Extremes. I do have to say that I find the ending of the short version of Dumplings a bit more satisfying than that of the feature. The good news is, for the price of one rental, you can see 'em both. You can check out my review of Three . . . Extremes here.
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