Dumplings: Fruit Chan's Grisly Fable of Youth

There is a version of Dumplings that plays as an exploitation film, and Fruit Chan declined to make it. The premise is Category III material of the most obvious sort — a woman in a Hong Kong flat sells rejuvenating dumplings with a filling sourced from aborted foetuses — and you can see the 1993 version of this in your head already: green light, a cackling ghoul, an axe. What Chan made in 2004 is a bright, clean, sunlit film about vanity and class, photographed by Christopher Doyle, in which the most disturbing thing on the soundtrack is a woman eating.

Mrs Li (Miriam Yeung) is a former television actress in her forties, married to a wealthy man (Tony Leung Ka-fai) who has stopped looking at her and has not stopped looking at other people. She has money, a magnificent flat, and no purpose. She goes to Aunt Mei (Bai Ling), who lives in a cramped public-housing block and who is, by her own account, considerably older than she appears — she claims to have practised as a doctor on the mainland for decades — and who makes dumplings. The dumplings work. Mrs Li knows what is in them. She keeps coming back.

The film that was a segment first

Worth getting the provenance right, because it explains the film’s shape. Dumplings began as Chan’s contribution to Three… Extremes, the 2004 anthology in which he, Park Chan-wook and Takashi Miike each delivered a short — a genuine summit of the era’s regional horror, and Chan’s segment was the one people left talking about. He then expanded it to a ninety-minute feature, released separately the same year.

Both versions exist and they are meaningfully different films. The short is a scalpel: premise, escalation, punchline, out. The feature has room for the marriage, for Mei’s history, for the class geography of Hong Kong, and for a subplot that the short could not accommodate. Purists tend to prefer the short. I think the feature is the better piece of work, because the material’s actual subject requires the time — the short is a shock, and the feature is an argument.

Craft: Doyle’s light, and the sound

Christopher Doyle shot this, straight off two decades as Wong Kar-wai’s cinematographer, and the decision that defines the film is the light.

Mei’s kitchen is nice. It is bright, tiled, well-organised, flooded with daylight from a window. She works in it with the unhurried competence of a good cook — the mincing, the folding, the pleating of the wrapper, the steamer lid going on — and Doyle films the process the way a food programme would, in clean close-up, with everything legible. There is no shadow to hide in and no grading to signal disgust. The audience is given a cookery sequence and left to supply the horror themselves, which they do, instantly and permanently.

That inversion is the film’s whole method. Horror conventionally warns you with its lighting. Dumplings refuses, and the refusal implicates you: you are watching a competent woman make lunch in a sunny kitchen, and the revulsion in your throat is coming from information rather than from the image. Chan has removed the film’s own opinion about what it is showing.

Then the sound. The dumplings crunch. This is the film’s single most famous attribute and it is a sound-design choice rather than a photographic one — a wet, crisp, cartilaginous snap, mixed forward, isolated in near-silence, repeated every time Mrs Li eats. Miriam Yeung, a popular Cantopop singer and light-comedy lead cast very much against type, chews through the film with a face that goes from disgust to determination to appetite, and the arc of that face is the entire narrative. By the last act she is asking for more, and the sound has not changed at all. Only she has.

What it is actually about

The commodity here is other people’s bodies, and Chan is specific about who is selling and who is buying. Mei brings her material from the mainland; the buyers are wealthy Hong Kong women. The film was made seven years after the handover, and it is filmed with the sourness of a director whose earlier work — the handover trilogy, Made in Hong Kong among it — was about the people the city’s prosperity was built on top of. The one-child policy is in the film’s bloodstream, and Chan does not editorialise about it, because he does not have to: the supply exists, and Dumplings is about a market that clears.

Bai Ling gives the performance that holds it together. Mei is charming, chatty, entirely without shame, and completely amoral in the specific way of a person who has decided that the practical questions are the only real ones. She dances around her kitchen to Cantopop. She discusses provenance the way a butcher discusses a supplier. Bai Ling plays her as the film’s happiest character, and the happiness is the horror.

The ancestor

The lineage most writing reaches for is the Category III cycle — the Hong Kong rating that produced The Untold Story and Ebola Syndrome and a decade of genuinely deranged cinema — and the connection is real, though Dumplings is far too controlled to be a member.

The truer ancestor is the cannibal-as-class-relation film, the tradition running from Swift’s A Modest Proposal through to something like We Are What We Are, Jorge Michel Grau’s 2010 Mexican film in which eating people is a family business conducted by the urban poor. Chan flips the polarity: his cannibals are rich, they are paying retail, and they are doing it for their skin. That is the innovation, and it is why the film has outlasted the shock that sold it.

For the Hong Kong horror that came after, Rigor Mortis is the other essential modern entry and takes the opposite route, drowning its housing estate in teal. For the neighbouring wave, The Eye is the Pang brothers at their most commercial.

The director nobody expected to make this

Fruit Chan’s presence on this material is the strangest thing about it, and it is the reason the film has the register it has.

Chan made his name in 1997 with Made in Hong Kong, a film shot on short-ends — leftover scraps of film stock begged and scrounged from other productions — with a cast of non-professionals and a budget that would embarrass a student. It is about teenagers in public housing with no prospects, released in the handover year, and it is one of the essential Hong Kong films of the decade. He followed it with more of the same territory: the working city, the estates, the people the skyline is standing on.

That biography is doing quiet work in every frame of Dumplings. A director who has spent his career filming the inside of a housing block does not shoot Mei’s flat as a den of iniquity; he shoots it as a flat, because he knows what those flats are and how their kitchens are laid out and how the light comes in. The geography of the film — the rich woman crossing the city to buy from the poor woman, the poor woman’s product travelling in the other direction — is Chan’s lifelong subject with a genre engine bolted on.

It also explains the film’s refusal to moralise about Mei. A more comfortable director would have made her a villain. Chan makes her a small-business owner who has identified a demand, sourced a supply, priced it correctly and delivers a product that does what it says. The atrocity is a transaction, conducted between two consenting adults, and the only person in the film who is genuinely disgusted by any of it is the audience.

The case against

The husband’s subplot is the weak strand. Tony Leung Ka-fai is very good, and the material asks him to be a fairly schematic bad man whose appetites conveniently rhyme with his wife’s. When the film cuts to him it loses the pressure it has built in Mei’s kitchen.

The feature also has a mid-section lull that the short obviously does not — a stretch of establishing the marriage that is better written than it is shot. And Chan’s ending, which I will come to, has an elegance that some viewers find too neat for a film that has spent an hour being clinical about the unspeakable.

It is intermittently available to stream; the Three… Extremes anthology is easier to find than the feature, and the feature is worth the hunt. Watch it hungry, if you like a dare.

Spoilers below

Mrs Li’s problem is that the dumplings work, and that the effect is dose-dependent, and that potency depends on provenance. The escalation is a supply-chain story. Ordinary material produces ordinary results; Mei explains, cheerfully, that the good stuff is older, and that a foetus at a later stage is worth considerably more. The film’s central act is therefore Mrs Li’s slow slide from customer to commissioner — she stops accepting what is offered and starts specifying what she wants.

The strand that Chan added for the feature is the one that makes it unbearable. A teenage girl is brought to Mei’s flat by her mother, pregnant by her own father. The abortion is performed in the kitchen. Mei handles it with professional gentleness and then keeps the material, because it is exactly the premium product her best customer has been asking for. The girl haemorrhages. Chan films the aftermath with the same daylight he gave the cookery.

Mrs Li eats it. She knows what it is. She knows where it came from. She has, by this point, taken a fully conscious step across a line she can name.

And it works. That is the ending’s real cruelty — no punishment arrives, no curse, no rot. Her husband comes back to her. The marriage is repaired on the terms she paid for. The consequence, when it lands, is domestic and administrative: Mei’s flat is emptied, Mei is gone, and the supply chain has to be replaced.

The last movement is Mrs Li in her own beautiful kitchen, in her own good light, having learned the technique. She has become the practitioner. Her final act, with a cleaver and a source she has arranged herself, is filmed at exactly the same clean distance as Mei’s first sunlit demonstration, and the film cuts before the shock and lands on the mundane. She got what she wanted. She is going to keep getting it. The horror is that the market was never the problem — the customer was always prepared to become the supplier, and Chan knew it from the first frame.