Nouvelle Cuisine

We saw a crazy Hong Kong film Saturday night, called Dumplings
in English and somberly titled Nouvelle Cuisine in French. It's about a former doctor who smuggles aborted fetuses from China and chops them up in order to prepare them as dumplings to serve wealthy women in her run-down apartment for a pretty penny. The fetus dumplings are supposed to make one young again. It's not so much a horror movie or even all that gory (except for one teenage abortion scene, ugh), but it was sort of horrifyingly dark in its portrayal of people's quest for youth and beauty at any cost. The film centers around a wealthy former television actress in her mid thirties whose husband is obsessed with twenty year old girls. It was sort of interesting because you didn't know if it was the dumplings that actually worked or if they had a placebo effect. In any case, there might have been all sorts of cultural references going on that, having no knowledge of Chinese mythology, I wouldn't have caught on to. It was explained at one point that a boy fetus is more "nourishing" than a girl and much harder to come by, due to the One Child policy in China, where boy children are more prized than girls and therefore girls are more likely to be aborted.

Oddly enough my French is still such crap that I can't follow a full-length film easily and I find that when watching a foreign film it's easier to watch it in the original language with French subtitles, rather than dubbed in French. I hope this changes someday.

After the film we went to our favorite Japanese place on the rue Ste Anne, but as we arrived just before closing time many things weren't available. The place is packed when we've come at eight pm, at 7pm there is no wait and it's filled with mainly japanese, and at 10:30pm it's filled with mainly French people. So we have decided that dining slightly earlier at around 7:30pm is the perfect time to go.

They have lovely udon soup, and no dumplings were consumed during this particular meal...