Waterworld

>> Shower is an elegant riff on a changing China

by MATTHEW HAYS

There are those films that stumble through cliché after cliché, each one heightening the overall sense that what you're watching is unbelievable and unappealing. Then there are films that somehow manage to embrace their clichés, making them seem organic to the story and inoffensive.

Luckily, Shower, the latest film from Chinese filmmaker Yang Zhang, falls into the latter category. The feature tells the simple story of an old man and his retarded son who run a traditional bathhouse and shower in Beijing. Family ties are strained when the shower owner's other son, who now lives a modern, big-city life, returns to reconnect with his father and brother.

The shower, meanwhile, has been earmarked for destruction to make way for a new construction complex. The bathhouse's clientele are an odd bunch. One man enters the male-only space to escape a conflicted marriage with his overbearing, combative wife. Another flees some loan sharks he owes money to. Two older men bicker over the rules of their game, in which they pit pet crickets against one another in battle.

The sequences add up to a running theme that is fairly obvious and certainly one we've seen before. The traditions of the film's father figure--and by extension of conventional China--are falling to the wayside while newer, and not necessarily better, things take their place. Yang points up China's rapid changes through a lushly shot flashback, in which pop recalls his childhood in a distant desert, where people were lucky to bathe once a week.

What saves Shower from cliché doom is Yang's elegant treatment of the theme. As familiar as the terrain is, the characters feel entirely fresh (due to excellent performances of the trio) and Yang treats them affectionately, while never going overboard on the sentiment.

Ultimately, the fate of the bathhouse becomes the film's emotional climax, with the retarded brother's fate closely intertwined. The film manages, by its final frames, to offer a poignant story with rich characters that transcends many of the clichés that could so easily have trapped it--no small feat, for sure.

Shower opens Friday, Dec. 15 at Cinéma du Parc. See repertory listings for show times