Shower Space Cowboys

...Not all one family deals with economic and so- profound and touching ways...

...The near Paul Baumann universality of director Zhang Yang's story also makes itself strongly felt...

...Countless American movies and novels THE WISDOM OF THE AGED have depicted the lives of young men or 'Shower' & 'Space Cowboys' women who move beyond an ethnic or working-class enclave into a bigger and more cosmopolitan world...

...Master come to the new China, where every Liu is not burdened by his menial labors recious little is simple about traditional human need can be catered but sanctified by them...

...ration of outer space is surely one of the young men who make China hum to Far from being a servile presence, most technically esoteric enterprises ever the fast-paced tune of "progress...

...Zhang Yang's new film, the bathhouse...

...From charting a to efficiently, cheaply, and impersonal- only washes your body but also your P course out of the earth's atly, thanks to the efforts of a million soul," he testifies...

...In its easygoing and mosphere and back again, eager entrepreneurs...

...much more than a dog sled, a compass, his younger brother Er Ming (iang Wu) "Whenever I see an old customer I am a modest stake, and a whole lot of gumpbrings him back to Beijing to check on happy," he explains...

...voted customers and intimate, hands-on nipulative in their own way...

...one setting sustain us in the next...

...Life in the tumbledown bath- nize the deeper order of things...

...With the wisdom of someone who known as Master Liu (Zhu Xu), runs a has known want and deprivation, the dilapidated bathhouse in a rundown father is grateful for what he has: "I can section of the city...

...SCRE touches on the universal appeal of singing "0 Sole Mio" in the shower...

...house seems hopelessly anachronistic...

...Reim- ter Liu stands up to them with quiet digmersed in this intense domestic setting, nity...

...When tally retarded, works alongside his fa- three young toughs assault a bathhouse ther, the two often cavorting more like customer who owes them money, Massiblings than father and son...

...They are still spehis elderly father's health...

...But certain Shower opens with Da Ming (Pu Cun rituals, reveals a whole other side to life, human truths do abide, especially if they Xin), the film's pensive protagonist, en- a side that rarely shows up in economic can be expressed with laughter, and tering a phone booth-like shower stall statistics or celebrations of economic Shower reminds us of the moral necessity on a busy city street...

...I can sleep...

...countless others, he has gone "south" his customers, adored by his needy Not long ago exploration didn't require to make his fortune...

...The day- virtue resides in the renunciation of new cial forces that seem as inexorable as to-day life of the bathhouse, with its de- things...

...The father, cial...

...Wel- and essential social bonds forged...

...whimsical way, Shower reveals why the to the engineering feats involved in deDa Ming, always dressed crisply in bathhouse matters and why modern con- signing and building rockets and vehia white shirt and pressed pants with venience can only destroy the social cles like the Space Shuttle, the explocell phone at the ready, is one of the meaning of Master Liu's vocation...

...Will the relation's geographical as well as social and every aspect of Chinese society beyond tionships and values that nurtured us in political terrain...

...What one hina, we read every day, is and the younger brother's guffawing generation considers the very definition in the midst of convulsive antics pathetic...

...And I can work...

...The old loyalties can be quite matime itself...

...Er Ming, who is men- eat...

...The water not space travel...

...ciated with a modern car wash...

...RecShower, takes us behind the dizzying Events conspire to keep Da Ming in onciling such disparate worlds is never export statistics and the tales of Dick- Beijing longer than he wants, and in easy, and Shower comes close to settling ensian factories to tell the story of how doing so reconnect him to his family in for an easy, sentimental answer...

...The bathhouse is, in fact, the of simple things like shared food and scrubbed, massaged, rinsed, and blown center of a community, a place where manual work and the care of those who dry with the automated precision asso- gossip is exchanged, games are played, cannot care for themselves...

...A postcard from younger son, and sure of his own worth...

...Like Master Liu is respected and trusted by to fall under the "adventure" category...

...the best is one that Wrinkled flesh Commonweal 2 8 September 8, 2000...

...Inside he is sluiced, progress...

...Not in my place, he tells the inDa Ming exudes a college freshman's truders...

...Shower's poignant revelations emerge The father's solicitous attitude toward effortlessly in a film suffused with genhis customers appears almost craven tle, funny moments...

...In the numinous world of the disdain for his family's parochial exis- bathhouse, even the local thugs recogtence...

...Seeing that his father's of success-a steady job and a roof over C economic change, change health is good, Da Ming is anxious to one's head-the next often finds conthat is altering that vast na- return to the world that is reshaping stricting, if not suffocating...