Shower = Xizhao

This sentimental family drama/comedy from Yang Zhang is set amid the ritualistic world of the Chinese bathhouse and has as its central conflict, family tradition and difference between generations. Da Ming is a businessman, happily ensconced in city ways, who receives a cryptic card from his mentally-handicapped, but exuberant and eternally happy brother, Er Ming. Fearing the worst, Da returns home to find his father contentedly running the local bathhouse, in a decaying neighbourhood of Beijing, and also acting as marriage counsellor and mediator to the many petty quarrels that abound within the male dominated arena. Although urbanised, Da’s ties to the ways of his family and background are rekindled. The bathhouse is more or less a character in itself - it serves as a meeting place for men, especially the elderly, who engage in the bathing practices, including suction cups, massage and shaving, whilst discussing the minutiae of life, and blissfully engaging in ceremonies steeped in old world values, keeping the time-pressed pace of modernisation at bay. At times the tone of the film is cloying, but the overall impression is one of a lilting comedy that speaks of China’s contemporary cultural issues examined within the experience of one small family. In Mandarin with English subtitles.