film screening

Shower, Dir. Zhang Yang, 1999

Nov 14th (Monday), Venue: Rm 131, Time: 4:30pm~

[http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/shower-2000]
The customers of the bathhouse in "Shower" hardly seem to spend any time anywhere else. The old men are there from morning to night, bathing, soaking, being rubbed, playing cards and staging fights to the death with their pet crickets (one feeds ant eggs to his champion; his opponent accuses him of using "steroids"). Master Liu has run this bathhouse since time immemorial and brushes off his son's suggestions that he retire: "I've done this all of my life and I like doing it!" The son is Da Ming (Pu Cun Xin), a successful businessman who lives in a distant city, but has returned because of an alarming postcard he received from his retarded brother Er Ming (Jiang Wu). The postcards seem to indicate that old Liu (Zhu Xu) is dead or dying, but in fact Liu is presiding, as he has for decades, over the closed world of the bathhouse, where steam and ancient customs wall out the changing ways of modern Beijing.