I Would Like to See It: Dumplings

There’s something so unusual about Bai Ling, some ineffable quality of strangeness which transforms her socially palatable thinness and beauty into something borderline grotesque. As the cannibalistic former OB GYN and abortion provider Aunt Mei in Fruit Chan’s Dumplings, that ghoulishness hangs particularly heavy. Ling moves with a noticeable hunch, frequently dropping into a squat that bends her spine nearly double. Her nails are long and curved, her teeth prominent. She looks, in her striped cigarette-leg slacks, like the lovechild of a supermodel and Michael Keaton’s Beetlejuice. Director Fruit Chan Gong pays special attention to her spidery fingers, always writhing or in stiff-jointed motion, and to her small, mobile mouth with its thin pink lips. We see her dice and pick, chew and pluck, rendering her role as a thief and eater of fetuses shockingly believable. When the realization that Ling is mimicking the body language of a woman forty years her elder hits at last, it seems less surprising than inevitable.

The script takes pains to render Aunt Mei’s grisly anti-aging remedies as sensually repellent as possible, and the way Ling massages and rolls every word of her monologue about the “creamy” layer of fat surrounding a five-month-old fetus is leagues more disturbing than the explicit backroom abortion she performs on a young pregnant girl. The stress of feminine disposability and the onerous weight of China’s only recently abolished “One Baby” law churns not far beneath the surface of the film. “A firstborn son is best,” Aunt Mei tells former actress Mrs. Li (Miriam Yeung) after feeding the other woman a dumpling containing said child. It’s a sort of ethos of conspicuous consumption, a purposeful reabsorption of what society says is most valuable and treasured to sustain the very thing it’s meant to overshadow.

Dumplings employs a deceptively simple color language to further texture its slippery, uncomfortable story. The deep green of Aunt Mei’s wallpaper, the delicate jellied pink of fetal tissue, the waxy pallor of unhealthy skin and the ruddy flush of new youth in bloom — Fruit Chan uses lighting and color to suggest Mrs. Li’s transformation as a matter of possible self-deception, yes, but one that successfully hoodwinks those around her as well. Is Aunt Mei, so smooth and unblemished even in her mantis-like boniness, truly in her sixties? Do her dumplings really turn back death’s clock? It’s not the point of the film. Instead we’re invited to fully inhabit the transgression Aunt Mei and Mrs. Li are committing together, the ghastly depths to which they’ll sink to preserve their youth and capture masculine attention, itself presented here as an indifferent and unreliable reward at best. The squeaking crunch of rubbery flesh, the sucking sound of air through a full mouth, the glassy eyes of one committed wholeheartedly to something miserable: these things are the point.