The film frames the painstaking details of daily life in the scrubby confinement of the family kitchen table, which also serves as the father's hide processing work station. Language is terse, but engaging wherever it occurs. There is no plot other than the preparation, cooking, and eating of Chinese dumplings, whereby the family conversation revolves around the uncertainty about the family business.
So, what's the point?
One way to interpret the film is to see the compulsively slow pace, the insistence on the minuscule details, and more importantly, the warmth, steadiness, and predictability of family life - metaphorically portrayed as the procedural routine of dumpling making, as an antithesis of the fast pace, uncertainty, and over-arousal of modern life. If that's Liu's goal, she has certainly succeeded by forcing the viewer to attend to the inertness and particularities of mundane life.
So, what's the point?
One way to interpret the film is to see the compulsively slow pace, the insistence on the minuscule details, and more importantly, the warmth, steadiness, and predictability of family life - metaphorically portrayed as the procedural routine of dumpling making, as an antithesis of the fast pace, uncertainty, and over-arousal of modern life. If that's Liu's goal, she has certainly succeeded by forcing the viewer to attend to the inertness and particularities of mundane life.
