You are what you eat

Reviewed - Dumplings/Gaau Ji: Fruit Chan's macabre immorality tale - as revolting as it is eerily beautiful - began life as one part of a portmanteau film and, in its taut, economical structure, it does remind one of an episode from an Amicus horror compilation of the 1970s.

But Dumplings has more in common with early Todd Haynes pictures than with those British entertainments. Like Haynes's Poison, it uses broad shock techniques to make serious points about sex and decay. Readers with even the slightest propensity to bolt when confronted with disturbing images should stay well away. Those who remain will be treated to one of the most original pictures of the season.

Set in and about Hong Kong, Dumplings begins with Qing (Miriam Yeung), a wealthy, elegant woman, once a famous actor, visiting Mei (Bai Ling), an eccentric mainlander, in an unglamorous section of the city. Mei has, it seems, a recipe for a class of dumpling whose consumption restores the youthful appearance of the fortunate diner.

Sure enough, Qing, whose husband has been frolicking with a younger woman, finds her life turning around. But what is that damp meat in the dumplings? Considering the silly furore that greeted Newton Emerson's recent piece on frozen embryos in this newspaper, we should perhaps say little more and allow the film to reveal its own gruesome secrets.

Dumplings is shot by the tireless Christopher Doyle, and his characteristically seductive images counterpoint the grim subject matter nicely. But, in technical terms, the film is more memorable for an uncanny sound design that bestows the same squelchy liquid noises on the eating of dumplings as it does on sexual congress. The director is, one presumes, here tying birth, death and regeneration up into the same messy package.

Fair enough, but the main effect, as with other imaginative touches throughout the picture, is to render the robust viewer delightfully appalled.