In the film circle of Nanyue Island for more than 20 years, Chen Guo is a director with mixed reputation. His serious film works "Made in XX", "Durian Piaopiao" and "Xianluxiang" have received unanimous praise and praise. His commercial typified works such as "Murder Like a Water Year", "The Brilliant Moment" and "The Nine Dragons" are hardly qualified works, and they have also been commercial failures.
"Dumplings" filmed in 2004 was originally a segment of the platter work "Three Watches 2". Chen Guo expanded it into a feature film as an attempt to turn to genre films in the course of many years of literary and artistic films. Because of this, it has the outer shell of a thriller/horror film (listed as level three), but it retains the metaphorical expression similar to that of "Made in XX" and other films.
Nowadays, when we look back and appreciate it carefully, we will find that the film’s extraordinary conception, slow rhythm and indistinguishable theme make it the most refined and complete one of Chen Guo’s works. At the same time, it is also a rare sword-moving work in the history of "Kojima" thriller.
1
In the actual Cantonese morning tea, shrimp dumplings and soup dumplings are common dim sums. But in "Dumplings", Chen Guo treated it "with ulterior motives" as a strange food from outside the rich world. Although its core "human embryo" is the essence, the way of "packing" it-making noodles, rolling the skin, ingredients, and mixing stuffing are all things the rich people living on this small island in southern Guangdong cannot. familiar.
When the outdated TV drama star Li Tai, who was married to a wealthy family but was troubled by her aging appearance, knocked on the iron door of the mysterious foreign woman's Aunt Mei with a glimmer of hope, the latter gave her such a human flesh dumpling feast. We don't know how it tastes, but from Li Tai's unbearable expression of swallowing and the embarrassment of constant retching, we can probably expect to see one or two. Li Tai endured the nausea and swallowed it forcibly, just because of its ability to rejuvenate the youthful face in the legend and Li Tai could not restrain the desire to restore a fresh and beautiful appearance.
Mrs. Li's anxiety didn't come out of thin air: her husband, Mr. Li, was energetic, looking for flowers and asking Liu (the interesting thing is that the food he used to enhance his abilities was also "embryos", just the "hairy eggs" of chicken embryos). Mrs. Li’s sense of crisis has doubled. If she loses her youth, her fate is likely to be replaced by other pretty girls. The feeling of being disliked and forgotten in aging made her shudder.
It was precisely in the desire for youth and thirst that she, who seemed weak and decent, could not bear the bewitching induction of Aunt Mei, and gradually became accustomed to the taste of fresh and tender human flesh, and even eagerly asked the latter to provide "the best products", so she became pregnant. The innocent student girl of the "evil species" became their target. Li Tai restrained his bloody fear and guilt of cannibalism, and enjoyed the expectation that the skin of his body was "reborn". And this "dumpling" has indeed become a panacea: Mr. Li, who has always been outside with flowers and troubles, suddenly became interested in his youthful wife. The two people's tender and honeyed "second spring" state made Mr. Li more. I firmly believe in and rely on the effect of "dumplings". Even if she exudes an unconcealable bloody air from this body, constantly reminding her of the actual cost of "rejuvenation", but she has been unable to get rid of the temptation to look glamorous, she can only sink deeper and deeper, unable to extricate herself, and finally go to battle. After buying the illegitimate embryos of Mr. Li and his mistress, her face showed a truly relieved smile when she raised the cleaver to the mirror. From passive to active, she actually completed a qualitative transformation of her personality.
2
In the early 2000s, the Hong Kong government formulated a grand plan for the development of high-tech digital industrial parks for economic transformation and industrial upgrading. The son of a real estate tycoon brought more than a dozen letters of intent to cooperate with the world's IT industry giants and bought a piece of more than 20 hectares of land on Hong Kong Island for free, claiming to promote the development of Hong Kong's Silicon Valley. In the past few years, there were few high-tech industrial projects on the originally planned land, but nearly 3,000 high-end sea-view apartments appeared. The son relied on real estate sales for tens of billions of dollars, but the "small island" economy missed the best time for transformation and was still spinning back and forth on the level of "selling uncompleted houses and speculating on land." Real estate houses have been speculated at sky-high prices, while ordinary citizens’ future opportunities have been thrown out as a bet to become a bargaining chip for the rich to make money. It is no wonder that the various media in Hong Kong will sigh that "the flesh is sucked dry" from time to time.
Since the beginning of "Made in XX", many of Chen Guo's films have a clear realistic relevance, and he is particularly good at suggesting the macro pattern with micro social details. "Dumplings" can be said to be the most meaningful performance of Chen Guo's "metaphoric" film: its rhetorical body and even metaphors disappear from the film, and even if the audience does not realize the directivity behind it, it is still possible Treat it as a horror/horror movie with a bad taste. But when we combine the "small island" big bourgeoisie—especially the real estate tycoons—look at the fortune and development history of the past half century (take the aforementioned Cyberport as an example), we will find it and "Dumplings" The central figure Li Tai's inner desire appeals for the vivid similarities: in order to maintain the light of their own body and keep their youthful vitality, these people can only hollow out their minds to squeeze nutrients from the ordinary people at the bottom. At first they may be twisted and doubtful, but at the same time they can't suppress their inner appeals: once they stop and "do not eat", they will immediately describe withered, weak and aging, and loss of vitality; and the only way to maintain a bright appearance is It is constantly "sucking blood" and "eating meat", and the "food" can only be taken from the "body" of the people at the bottom of society.
We may ask why there is no other path to a virtuous circle of healthy development. At this time, the instruction function of "Dumplings" is clear: Why does Mrs. Li choose to eat dumplings filled with human flesh instead of exercising to stay young? The answer is obvious. The latter saves time and effort and achieves surprisingly fast results. In the words of Aunt Mei, "it is twice the result with half the effort." Once you get used to such blood transfusion-style maintenance and treatment, you can never stop like a drug addict seeing white powder.
3
"Dumplings" is at the same time a genre film with a restrained, meticulous rhythm and a degree of relaxation.
Unlike most Hong Kong films that express exaggeration and restlessness, Chen Guo deliberately slowed down the rhythm of the film, so that Du Kefeng's photography can calm down, using close-up fixed short focus shallow depth of field close-ups to show that Li Tai and Aunt Mei are very different Psychological contrast reflected by different physical postures: one of them is mentally guilty and indecisive but at the same time driven by a strong desire, he is determined to do whatever he wants while facing the heartbreak of his vivid self in the past The price breaks through the bottom of the human relationship is only for eternal youth; while the other uses his own bright and charming figure as a model of temptation, and leads the former into the path of "cannibalism and preservation".
In the immersive and fascinating atmosphere, bright color blocks frequently appeared in the picture: the green of the walls in Meimei’s house, the red of Li Tai's handbag, the large area of colorful patterns in her suit, and even Mr. Li deliberately dyed it. The snow-white hair set off each other, just right to make the human embryo in Meimei's kitchen a reasonable one in this horrible dream scene. In the perceptual cognition of Mrs. Li, Mr. Li and Aunt Mei, it is embedded in their bodies, thoughts, spirits and emotions, and becomes an indispensable part. The expectation of "preservation of the human body" seems to be a logical and unstoppable inevitability.
Chen Guo, who was born in mainland China, also used the song in a magical way: when Mrs. Li was flustered when she ate dumplings for the first time, the singing of "The waves of Honghu Lake" echoed in her ears, soft singing and wrapping style. The sound effect brought Mrs. Li into the gentle homeland of meditation, as if all burdens and sins could fade away with the enchanting atmosphere. What awaited her was unspeakable relief and the joy of dreams come true. The so-called "drunken life, dream of death" has been perfectly embodied on the screen in this short moment of audio-visual combination. When Aunt Mei magically appeared in the last scene of the film with a mud-leg straw hat carrying a pole on her shoulders, it seemed that the film was deliberately revealing the mystery of the characters' identities: where they came from and why they stayed here. , And where he is going to go, Chen Guo already has self-explanatory notes in Chen Guo's special vocabulary dictionary.
4
After "Dumplings", Chen Guo never led the development of a work with such patience and precise rhythm. Although more than ten years later, "I got on the red VAN from Mong Kok to Tai Po in the early morning of that night" and "San Fu" both refer to the innuendo and do not explain, and each has a formal stylization. Characteristics, but with such a comfortable sense of rhythm to shoot a heavy-tasting thriller horror film, the contrast effect that complements each other and sets off each other only appears this time in his past works. And he also took "Dumplings" as an opportunity to gradually deviate from the track of serious realistic movies and turn to the creation of genre films with a strong sense of form.
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