Mar
11
After moving to Hong Kong from…
March 11, 2010 | |
After moving to Hong Kong from mainland China, former abortion doctor Mei (Bai Ling) has established a highly profitable black-retail speed selling dumplings from her small apartment in an familiar protection block. Not just any dumplings, cognizant you: made with special stuff that Mei picks up on regular trips back over the frontier, these can discontinue or despite mirror the ageing process – an irresistible proposition to former TV soap famed Mrs Li (Miriam Yeung), already afraid of losing her looks and her husband (Tony Leung Ka Fai [the ‘other’ Tony Leung]). There’s just the disconcerted problem of what’s actually in them…
‘Dumplings’ originated in the shocker compendium ‘Three… Extremes’, alongside control by Takashi Miike and Car park Chan-Wook. Expanded to facet length, it remains a claustrophobic, uncomfortable piece of work, relying less on supernatural horror, gross-old-fashioned effects or even narrative suspense than on slowly curdling considerate relationships and heightened social realism. The womb-churning leading premise is heavily signposted from the start but – a only one deadpan cookery scenes notwithstanding – it’s Euphemistic pre-owned for satire rather than visceral exploitation: Mei’s cool-headed, border-hopping firm is a casing study in market pragmatism, servicing the requirements of the HK vanity work with the waste products of Chinese birth-authority over policy. Unqualified Wong Kar-Wai collaborator Chris Doyle’s photography offers a neat balance between shabby naturalism and improbable radiance while Bai Ling’s Mei is sexy, canny, flour-dusted and sensible, but not quite real; Miriam Yeung’s Mrs Li is more plausible, haughtiness and compulsion drop by drop overtaking her primary revulsion. Like most base-of-youth fables, ‘Dumplings’ never seems actually credible and the plot baggily dissipates towards the end, but it leaves a long-drawn-out and characteristic aftertaste.
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