Shower
With Zhu Xu, Pu Cun Xin, Jiang Wu, He Zheng, Zhang Jin Hao, Lao Lin, and Lao Wu.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Editors who depend on studio ads aren’t our only cultural commissars. Chicago Tonight, for instance, doesn’t fit that category, yet its desire to genuflect toward southern California was certainly evident both times I appeared on the show. The first time was during the Oscar hoopla in 1994; the second was the day after Christmas two years later, when I agreed to appear only if I’d be allowed to speak not just about studio releases but about a couple of independent movies, one of them foreign: Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man and Andre Techine’s Thieves. John Callaway, the host, finally made good on his promise by allowing me to mention them for a few seconds over the show’s final credits.
Now I’m faced with what to say about a foreign movie that’s conceivably more audience friendly than Time Regained, Dead Man, and Thieves combined. Shower, playing this week at the Music Box, is a cheerful crowd pleaser from mainland China that’s been entertaining audiences across the globe for the past year. Seeing it recently with a Cinema/Chicago crowd, I felt something I hadn’t till then felt in a Chicago movie house this summer–that all of us in the audience were having a good time. Is this because most Cinema/Chicago members don’t hail from the suburbs? I doubt it.
There’s a lot more to Shower than this indicates. To start with, there’s the ease with which director Zhang Yang moves between reality and fantasy. The movie starts with a fantasy about an automated bathhouse of the future, a sort of dreamy car wash for humans–in contrast to a real car wash that crops up later in the movie–before settling into the homey, old-fashioned bathhouse that will serve as its main location and focus. The transition is extremely graceful, and subsequent fantasy interludes are introduced with similar deftness.
