Shower

It's a bit disconcerting that it starts with its most amusing scene - a daydream vision of the bath-house of the future as a kind of carwash for humans - but Zhang's wry lament for the public baths of yesteryear is fresh, funny and sad enough to survive playing its trump cards too early. The elderly Mr Liu (Zhu) runs the dilapidated Qingshui Bath-house in Beijing, offering baths, showers, body scrubs, aria practice and a sense of community to men of all ages. His retarded son Erming (Jiang, brother of the great Jiang Wen) is a loyal helper; his elder son Daming, embarrassed by the family business, has gone off to get rich in the Special Economic Zones down south. The characters, twists and sub-plots are all straight out of soap opera, but Zhang marshalls them with enough skill to make the whole a credible reflection of modernisation and loss in present-day China.