Shower (Xizao)

They don’t come much more charming than Shower, a Chinese film by
Zhang Yang with a delicacy and a poignancy in its humor that is almost French.
Its theme is a compelling one too, depicting in comic yet poignant form the
clash between the new economy in post- Mao, post-Deng China and the old ways of
local and traditional communities. Without being strident or satirical about it
(presumably the powers that be in China would not allow such emphases in any
case), it comes down on the side of the old ways, the community and the devotion
to family exemplified in its main characters: the old man, Mr Liu (Zhu Xu), who
runs a provincial bathhouse, the retarded son, Er Ming (Jiang Wu) who helps him,
and Da Ming (Pu Cun Xin), the older son, a cell-phone toting businessman from
the city, who comes to visit them.

The dramatic set-up is thus very familiar to us. First there is the
heart- tugging love between this nice old man and his happy but damaged son, who
are also best pals and race each other through the city for exercise and compete
to see who can hold his breath longer. But then this relationship also comes to
stand for the human scale on which the family business, the dilapidated
bathhouse, operates within its community.
It’s Gemeinschaft versus
Gesellschaft, the homely virtues of mom-and-pop businesses, whose
customers are also mom and pop’s friends, versus soulless corporate capitalism
and the inevitable economic disruptions of
“progress.”
Even those who are on the side of progress can permit themselves a nostalgic
moment or two about the old days and no harm done.

One word of caution, however, may be in order, which is that nowhere in this
paean to traditional Chinese ways is there any mention of the Communist
past — or, for that matter, the Communist present — of the Chinese
provinces. You would think that Mister Liu had been running his provincial
bath-house as a small businessman and entrepreneur for decades, when of course
we know that that can hardly have been the case. The bath-house may be
traditional among Chinese men as a place to pass the time of day, drink tea,
play Chinese checkers and stage cricket fights, just as we see it here, but for
most of the last half century the principal threat to this way of life has been
not American-style economic progress but the demands of the all-powerful state
upon the labor and the social life and the very thoughts of its subject
people.

Well, a Chinese filmmaker’s got to do what he’s got to do, I suppose, and
given the current emphasis on the glory of getting rich, it is almost evidence
of humanity in the Chinese leaders that they are willing to permit this kind of
celebration of a way of life at odds both with the Communist ideology they once
espoused and the “capitalist” efficiency they now hope to practice. Indeed, as
the old-fashioned Marxists would have pointed out, this kind of sentimentality
is almost a precondition of the necessary re-bourgeoisification of China and her
re-commitment to real (as opposed to fantasy) economics. Not that, as Jerry Seinfeld
would say, there’s anything wrong with that!

At any rate there is much to enjoy. The people are engagingly familiar while
at the same time charming in their exoticism. I especially liked the two old men
who pit their gryllidine champions against one another in a little china bowl.
The loser accuses the winner of having cheated by feeding his cricket, who has
defeated his own mighty
“Godzilla,”
on ant eggs — the equivalent of steroids if you’re a cricket, apparently.
Such crickets would be disqualified at the Olympics, he says. The other denies
it and gives Godzilla’s conqueror a bath too, to celebrate his victory, in a
bowl of water. Meanwhile, a henpecked husband (Bei Bei) has to be massaged back
to health by Mr Liu after being beaten up by his wife. Mr Liu takes a genuine
but not obtrusive interest in the
man’s marriage
( “You and your wife, always coming to
blows over the littlest things” ) and
eventually divines the real problem between them, the
man’s impotence, and provides a
solution to it.

Having established the character of the community, the film turns back to the
family saga. When Da Ming turns away for a moment and allows Er Ming to wander
off, his father is furious with him. “Go back to Shenzhen,” he tells him. “Why
did you come back?. . .I know you don’t respect me or what I do.” The words are
wounding to Da Ming, as is the charge that all he wants to do is go home and
“make big money.” His father tells him that “Er Ming and I are fine without
you…I’ve already lost you. I can’t lose my other son too.” But Er Ming turns
up and there is a touching reconciliation between the father and his eldest son.
Then the two strands to the story are brought together when dad dies just at the
point where the local authority has determined to tear down the bathhouse and
build a shopping center and high-rise apartments.

It is obviously the end of an era, to coin a phrase. Even the cricket fights
will now stop since, as one of the cricket-owners confidently asserts, “Crickets
can’t survive in multi-storey buildings.” When one of the younger men sitting
around discussing the demise of the bath house tries to defend the more
up-to-date practice of taking showers at home, the older men strongly disagree
with him. “Taking a bath here is a lot more luxurious,” they insist. “It’s warm
and there’s so much laughter.” It’s also associated in our minds with Mr Liu’s
story of the holy Tibetan lake that cleanses the soul as well as the body. Er
Ming’s sense of the poignancy of his loss brings up this comparison for us. Now
all he has left is his penitent and newly-loving brother — but that’s enough
to give the film an up-beat ending and to make the connection between community
and family.