Shower (Xizao)
(Zhang Yang 1999)
Shower (Xizao)
(Zhang Yang 1999)
Festival Screenings & Awards :
Winner of International Critics' Award, 1999 Toronto International Film Festival;
Golden Space Needle (Best Picture), Best Director, 2000 Seattle International Film Festival.
Shower is the story of a father and his two sons. The eldest son (Da Ming) has left home in search of fortune in the business world of Shenzhen while his father remains in Beijing raising his mentally-challenged brother (Er Ming) and clinging to his chosen profession as the master of a bath-house.
One name stands out on the credits of "Shower,"
a gentle Chinese comedy that
opens next week in New York. Among the Chinese personnel -- the director Zhang
Yang, the cinematographer Zhang Jian, and Pu Cun Xin, a popular theater actor
starring as a prodigal son who comes home to run his father's outmoded
neighborhood bathhouse in Beijing -- there is the conspicuously occidental
moniker of the producer, Peter Loehr...
Other Reviews:
When the film unfolds, Da Ming (He Zheng), who works in capitalism-oriented South as a businessman, returns to his family home in Beijing after being hinted that his elderly father (Zhu Xu) has passed away. Da Ming's father owns a traditional bathhouse which he runs with the help of his other son, mentally challenged Er Ming (Jiang Wu).
"Shower" examines the current state of Chinese culture where traditions are being abandoned by the modern world. A young wealthy businessman's icy attitude toward his working-class background is about to thaw as he is forced to reconnect with his elderly father and mentally challenged younger brother, who together run a public bathhouse.
See
This Review
An excellent, warmer, gentler, kinder Chinese film, and a special case. It was made neither as a State project or with foreign moneys, but with funds raised within China by its American producer. It is the second of three highly successful features by the same director-producer team.. On the international festival circuit "Shower" has won many top or major awards.
Zhang Yang's bittersweet dramatic comedy, "Shower," is meant to be a crowd pleaser. Its manipulative and sugary story is set in modern Beijing. When Da Ming (Pu Cun Xin) received a postcard from his retarded younger brother Er Ming (Jiang Wu) of a picture of his elderly father lying on his bed, he assumed that his father passed away and decided to leave his business duties in southern China's region of Shenzhen to see for himself. Why he didn't phone is a mystery, since he doesn't seem to go anywhere without his cell phone. The only reason I can think of him making the journey home is that since he had no contact with his father, Master Li (Zhu Xu), for a long period of time, maybe he thought he would use this as an excuse to see how everything is going at home.
The old and new Chinas meet and mingle in "Shower," a gently humorous and remarkably moving elegy to community and friendship in which the message comes as much from the performances as anything explicit in the dialogue. Set among the denizens of an old-style Beijing bathhouse that's due to be demolished, pic is the third and artiest of fledgling Beijing indie Imar Film's slate to date; paradoxically, it could turn out to be its breakthrough title with fests and quality buyers.
Born
in 1967, Zhang Yang received his BA in Chinese Literature from Zhongshan University
(Guangdong Province) in 1988 and continued his study in the Directing Department
of the Central Drama Academy in Beijing. After graduating from CDA in 1992,
he entered the Beijing Film Studio and is now working for the studio as a
director.