SHOWER
Reviewed by Harvey Karten Sony Pictures Classics Director: Zhang Yang Writer: Liu Fen Doug, Zhang Yang, Huo Xin, Diao Yi Nan, Cai Xiang Jun Cast: Zhu Xu, Pu Cun Xin, Jiang Wu, He Zheng, Zhang Jin Jao, Lao Lin, Lao Wu
To my knowledge, no other picture made on the Chinese mainland for worldwide distribution opens with quite the flair of this one. A pulsating drumbeat adds rhythm to a crisply dressed young man's brisk walk to an ATM in a spanking city whose downtown area seems filled with all the urbanity of New York's Rockefeller Center. He enters a building, takes off his clothes which are to be quickly dry cleaned, inserts some coins in an automatic laundry, and puts himself under a shower. More like a car wash, this is like no shower that you'll find even in the United States. Large brushes twirl around hitting his body, then retreating, only to attack the gentleman again, massaging his back while adding soap and washing him off. Overhead dryers discharge torrents of hot air that make his hair stand on end. He leaves the shower, picks up his newly-pressed clothes, and he's off. End of drumbeat. For a few minutes you might think you've wandered into the trailer for a James Bond movie. This is a China that most of us in the West do not know, a place in which at least a lucky proportion of the 1.3 billion population are making the big ones. In fact you might even think that director Zhang Yang, whose work was recently featured at New York's New Directors/New Films series, is feeding us propaganda from the moment the protagonist gets his own brainwashing under the steamy torrents of water.
The big irony is that we are indeed receiving propaganda but of a sort opposite that which we have been led to believe. If Zhang is not exactly prescribing a return to communism in China, he is at least shedding some cinematic tears over its demise. We're not talking about the totalitarian communism practiced by Chairman Mao or about the forced labor of the commune, but the kind of communism that emphasizes the word's root: community. Community, to Zhang, is being lost in China's race to prosper, in its abandoning of the basic principles of neighborhood, a common trust, a one-big-family spirit missing in the West.
But "Shower" is anything but a dull political tract: in fact politics as such does not even enter the picture. This is a sincere, appropriately sentimental and often humorous look at an old man's family, one which has seen its eldest son deserting the fold to go for the riches of the southern Chinese industrial district of Shenzhen while his dad and his retarded brother remain behind in battered Beijing surroundings.
Stories of sons reaching out to their estranged fathers when the time for reconciliation is virtually past are not uncommon, but Zhang gives this strain a uniquely Chinese beat. The story opens with panache as yuppie Da Ming (Pu Cun Xin), having given himself a razzle-dazzle wash-up, flies north to Beijing believing that his father, Master Liu (Zhu Xu), has died. Looking with disappointment, even scorn, on his mentally challenged brother, Er Ming (Jiang Wu), he is nonetheless relieved to see that his father is still very much alive, and happily running a broken-down bathhouse that accommodates mostly elderly men. While the older man provides the hot water in which the customers communally bathe as though in a prehistoric version of a Japanese tub, he massages their backs and strokes their egos, dispensing avuncular advice about issues ranging from domestic relations to the care and training of fighting crickets. The men drink tea, play chess, and watch their cricket matches, occasionally disturbed by the resonant singing of "O Sole Mio" by a chubby teen patron--who is able to sing only when water pours about his body.
Da Ming sees his father for the first time...a man who lovingly takes care of his handicapped son, racing him around the block and competing with him in the water, and being looked up to by the motley denizens of the bathhouse--which provides even pedicures among its various services. As Da Ming and Master Liu become re-acquainted, the older man tells his career-oriented son the almost mythical story of his meeting decades ago with his wife, who had come from a dry and dusty region of China which provided few baths indeed for its citizens. Young Da Ming becomes aware of the spiritual poverty of his own urban life, later emerging as frustrated as his dad and his father's patrons are upon hearing the awful news that the neighborhood is being gentrified. The baths and adjacent housing are to be torn down to build a shopping center.
"Shower" is a bitter-sweet tale of reconciliation that hasn't an insincere bone in its body. The portrayals are authentic, the ensemble acting is appropriately muted and lively as called for by the situations. You cannot be blamed if you see your own community here in the West threatened by the sort of spirit-numbing gentrification that has taken place in the name of progress, obviously giving this picture a universality missing from even some of the great works of Zhang Yimou.
The film won the FIPRESCI Award at the 1999 Toronto Film Festival and has been exhibited--with other prizes as well--at San Sebastian, Thessaloniki, Vancouver, Sundance and Rotterdam.
Rated PG-13. Running time: 92 minutes. (C) 2000 by Harvey Karten, film_critic@compuserve.com
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