There are things you can't believe people just do to achieve something important to them. This, I think, I call obsession. And what is obsession? I define it as an irrational motive for performing trivial or inchoerent and compulsive actions against everyone's will. A psychological feature that is inconsistent with reason or logic.
And that's what this movie is about: To remain beautiful and young, a woman embarks in a sick and disgusting taste for a repugnant menu... Dumplings as they say... but really they're more than that!
This remind me of Erzsébet Báthory, Countess of Transylvania during the XVII century, when she firmly believed that if she bathed in the blood of young virgins she could be young and healthy forever.
"Dumplings" is uncomfortable, nauseous but captivating at the same time. The story of Ching Lee (Miriam Yeung), retired TV actress, who goes into the moral's depths of pursuing the eternal youth. With her betraying husband (Tony Leung Ka Fai) and the underground female chef Mei (Bai Ling), the critic goes far beyond the main subject, talking about, ironically, the narcissist impulses and the birth control in China as in the superfluous and pointless today's society way of living.
The movie is a spiral between revenge, betrayal, obsession and frustration with some vile and loathsome graphical scenes that should, undoubtedly, be offensive for the sensible ones.
Rather than be just a shocking film, Fruit Chan, the director, constructs a masterpiece of unappeasable fixation that's to stay young at all costs and thus, deepening it into the viewer's subconscious, awakes us to other facts: When we have a strong physiological obsession, we humans, do whatever it takes to fulfill that desire...
