| SHOWER Director: Zhang Yang "The bathhouse is a symbol of an old style of life in China. Society is changing and people lose close relationships with each other and in the bathhouse you can get this feeling back." Yang Zhang Shower directed by Zhang Yang is, in some ways, a response to the current white-collar attitude of ignoring familial obligations by pursuing capitalistic motives. It is a movie about a man who must face reality when his father dies. Da Ming (Pu Cun Xin) is a white collar Chinese businessman who returns to his home when he receives an alarming postcard from his brother, Er Ming (Jiang Wu), that leads him to believe that his father has died. Upon returning he finds Dad and brother doing fine and in good spirits running their family’s public bathhouse. Turns out his brother - who is mentally handicapped -- has sent a misleading postcard. Da Ming decides to stay for a little vacation. The family owned bathhouse is a communal microcosm of the neighborhood, most of which is made up of elderly men who come to gossip and play games while they get a massage or take a sauna or a bath. But the bathhouse is decaying and it’s easy to see that it is only a matter of time before Da Ming’s elderly father (Zhu Xu) passes on and the bathhouse will most likely go down with him. Perhaps because Da Ming knows that one day he will have to inherit his father’s business he has a cool attitude toward the working class environs of his small town home. He is among the generation of young Chinese men who left home for the big city with the sole objective of making money and raising a family far away from their modest small village upbringings. Da Ming must also face the fact that when his father dies he will have to take care of his brother, Erming, who although he has a certain kind of simple wisdom and innocent charm is a handful. He's also rather annoying at times. As played by Jiang Wu he is often an irritating character and the jokes that deal with his simple mindedness are more dumb than they are funny. Shower is occasionally funny but it has a tendency to mix the humor with its overtly serious message in an awkward way thus making the film an ineffective comedy with serious themes. Part of the problem too is that the payoff comes too late to save the movie from its banal beginnings. Of interest, though, about three-quarters of the way through Shower there is an abrupt edit that shifts time, mood and setting so completely that it’s easy to believe that a reel from some other movie has accidentally been spliced in. If anything, it is such a wild shift that it makes you sit up and take notice of the scene and try to place it within the context of what’s come before. This scene change doesn’t make the movie better but, since it explains motivations and gives us some background, it does manage to make it a bit more interesting. Similar to the Danish film Mifune -- a better film with a similar theme -- Shower starts pretty slow but gets better as the characters and the situations develop. It is also much more critical than Mifune in its approach to a son’s obligations toward his family after the death of a parent. And too it is rather Zen-like (or realistic -- depending upon how you look at it) toward its open ending final scenes. Unfortunately, even though the subject of a son's responsibilities and obligations toward his family after his father's death are important the overall effect of Shower is lukewarm rather than refreshing. - Matt Langdon |