Shower (94 mins, 12) Directed by Zhang Yang; starring Zhu Xu, Pu Cun Xin, Jiang Wu
Men of Honour (128 mins, 15) Directed by George Tillman Jr; starring Robert De Niro, Cuba Gooding Jr, Charlize Theron
Save the Last Dance (112 mins, 12) Directed by Thomas Carter; starring Julia Stiles, Sean Patrick Thomas
About Adam (105 mins, 15) Directed by Gerard Stembridge; starring Stuart Townsend, Kate Hudson, Frances O'Connor, Charlotte Bradley
Blow Dry (90 mins, 15) Directed by Paddy Breathnach; starring Alan Rickman, Natasha Richardson, Rachel Griffiths
The Monkey's Mask (94 mins, 18) Directed by Samantha Lang; starring Susie Porter, Kelly McGillis
Damnation (120 mins, 15) Directed by Bela Tarr; starring Miklos B. Szekely, György Cserhalmi, Vali Kerekes
2001: A Space Odyssey (149 mins, U) Directed by Stanley Kubrick; starring Keir Dullea, Gary Lockwood, William Sylvester
Zhang Yang's Shower is the work of an independent company set up in China by the American producer, Peter Loehr, to cater for the young urban Chinese audience with movies that eschew rural and historical subject matter. It's a brisk, enjoyable affair on themes of tradition and family about a successful young businessman, Da Ming, returning to Beijing to visit his dying father, Liu, who runs a decaying community bathhouse in an old suburb with the help of his mentally retarded younger son, Er Ming.
Liu's bathhouse is a place where people can relax, feel good about their bodies, chat, play mah-jong, and gamble on fights between trained crickets. Liu doesn't just massage his visitors - he keeps the peace, reconciles couples, and (through his young son) helps an aspiring opera singer to confront his stage fright. Of course the place is about to be torn down to make way for a shopping mall, and Da Ming realises the importance of his father's life and values and comes to accept responsibility for his younger brother.
Western audiences might see in Shower a coming together of some familiar plots from European and American films. On the one hand there's the story of the self-centred businessman who finds redemption in caring for a mentally retarded brother after a father's death - the story of Rain Man and the Dogma production Mifune. On the other there's the tale of people fighting to keep open a community bath in the face of a faceless progress - the plot of both Steaming, the Nell Dunn play filmed by Joseph Losey, and the recent Italian film, Hamam - The Turkish Bath .
The week's two American films are about very different stages of the post-war black experience. The better of the two is George Tillman Jr's earnest, plodding Men of Honour, an inspirational movie based on the career of Carl Brashear (Cuba Gooding Jr), a Kentucky dirt-farmer's son, who joins the navy in the late 1940s and discovers that the only work he's given is cooking on a destroyer. A formidable swimmer, he comes to admire Billy Sunday (Robert De Niro), Master Chief Navy Diver, and determines to be the first black man to get into diving school.
At every stage he's obstructed by the virulent racism of officers, petty officers and fellow ratings, not least Sunday himself, a sadistic Southern bigot. But by sheer determination he makes it through one masochistic confrontation after another, culminating in his demand to have a damaged leg amputated so that he can get back into diving with a prosthetic leg. The painful finale resembles the end of On the Waterfront where the crippled Brando is driven on by his priest to lead the dockers back to work.
Gooding Jr is impressive as this inner-directed character, making his way in a world where white men make the rules and arbitrarily interpret them. In contrast Save the Last Dance has a white heroine, the 17-year-old Sarah (Julia Stiles), who is brought to Chicago by her negligent father after her dedicated mother's death, and put into a school almost entirely black. Most of her fellow pupils regard her with suspicion or contempt, but one of them, an 18-year-old with a baby son, takes her under her wing, giving Sarah a crash course in African-American talk and a sartorial makeover so she can attend a hip hop club.
Her new friend's brother (Sean Patrick Thomas), top scholar in the school and with a scholarship to Georgetown University, both teaches her the basics of hip hop and break-dancing, and encourages her to resume her dancing ambitions and to audition for Juilliard with a black-inflected contemporary dance in her repertoire. The movie is contrived and sentimental, but emotionally it goes for the same targets as Billy Elliot and in much the same way.
The week's two films from the British Isles are both directed by Irishmen. Gerard Stembridge's About Adam is fairly entertaining. Paddy Breathnach's Blow Dry is one of those native comedies that should be buried with others of its ilk in a long, deep trench in the remote countryside, were there not more pressing calls for the space.
About Adam is set in a cheerful, affluent, guiltless Dublin where debonair Adam (Stuart Townsend), owner of a fashionable art gallery dealing in photographs, seduces three beautiful sisters and their brother's fiancée, and more-or-less seduces their virgin brother and spirited widowed mother. It's a little like a lite version of Pasolini's Theorem with Adam as a priapic social chameleon, and at the end doesn't amount to much. But it's nicely told by Stembridge and attractively acted. Kate Hudson, Frances O'Connor and Charlotte Bradley are gorgeous as the contrasted sisters. As a singing waitress at a trendy restaurant Hudson handles some evergreen numbers with authority.
The author of the screenplay for Blow Dry is undisclosed but the opening credits state rather mysteriously that it's 'Based on the screenplay Never Better by Simon Beaufroy', who wrote The Full Monty. In fact it has a Full Monty and Brassed Off sort of story in which some dispirited provincial barbers decide to compete in the National British Hairdressing Championships when they're held in the town hall at Keighley in Yorkshire.
A snarling Alan Rickman gets together with his ex-wife and co-stylist Natasha Richardson who left him for a lesbian partner (Rachel Griffiths) and now has terminal cancer. They intend to challenge an old rival, preening Bill Nighy, who's made it big in London.
As a comedy Blow Dry is an utter failure and indeed for much of the time it goes for pathos and doesn't try to be funny. In addition to the running theme of Richardson's cancer, the film also hits us with senior citizen Rosemary Harris's blindness. At least the bad taste of the film-makers matches that of the camp creations of the hairdressers. Not since Ishtar has there been a worse film with so much talent on either side of the camera.
From Australia comes an odd noir thriller, Samantha Lang's The Monkey's Mask, ridiculous but watchable. The formidably freckled Susie Porter plays a Sapphic private eye, hired by a well-off couple to find their daughter, a university student who wrote erotic verse and had sex with every poet in Sydney. The search, which becomes a murder investigation, takes her into Australia's bizarre literary world of posing, untalented poets, and into the bed of a bisexual professor of literature played by the voluptuous Kelly McGillis. The film's best line is delivered by McGillis: 'You're a great fuck, but you're a very ordinary detective.' We are expected to recognise this as a paraphrase of a remark Marlene Dietrich makes about Orson Welles in A Touch of Fear .
Finally two blasts from the past. The first is Bela Tarr's monochrome Damnation, made in 1987 during the final heroic decade of serious Hungarian cinema, but never previously shown here. It's a misanthropic allegory taking place in constant rain in a decaying small town where a listless Karrer (played by Miklos Szekely, one of Hungary's most distinguished actors) has an affair with a singer at the Titanic Bar, involves her husband in some smuggling racket, and shops them to the police. The central symbol of life's absurdity is the ever-moving cable overhead constantly transporting tipping buckets of industrial waste back and forth from an electricity plant to a slag heap. The film is almost literally hypnotic - you want to leave, but you feel compelled to sit and watch.
The other old movie is Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey of 1968, back in a new print. So often do I watch it in part or whole on TV that - unlike his A Clockwork Orange - I hadn't noticed its absence from the cinema where it should be seen.
