Meeting of old and new

by ALEXANDER WALKER, Evening Standard

Beijing director Zhang Yang's movie Shower, despite its title, centres on a communal bath-house, the symbol of an old style of life in China, a refuge for the men from their wives, and a stock exchange of gossip.

It is run by two brothers, one slightly retarded. Then back into the city comes a nephew, a young man more accustomed to the individual shower than the communal bath, whose immersion in the old rites and rituals, massages, therapies and discussions, suggests the compromise that needs to be made between the watershed societies of old and new China.

It's an affectionate film, which lays on the local colour thickly and finds something to like in every client of the bath house, even the gangsters.

If Ealing Studios had been less prim and proper this is maybe how we would have pictured the two Britains of post-war years, with a slight list in favour of the old and what we lose by switching to the new.

Most watched News videos