Sauna on Moon
嫦娥
China, 2011, colour, 1.85:1, 94 mins.
Director: Zou Peng 邹鹏.
Rating: 6/10.
Loosely structured but engaging portrait of characters around a sauna/brothel in southern China.
STORY
Guangdong province, China, the present day. Wu (Wu Yuchi) manages an upmarket brothel called the Sauna Moon Goddess Chang’e, though business is only middling at the moment. The girls, who are managed by Li (Yang Xiaomin), who has a young son by a man who left her, include wannabe singer Meng Yan (Meng Yan) from Sichuan province and Pink (Zhan Yi). Li’s friend Lei (Lei Ting) pimps for them. Wu’s protector is businessman Lin, one of whose friends, Song, requests a virgin from him. Wu tells Lei to find one and the latter recruits factory girl Hou. However, when Hou runs away afterwards, Lei demands an extra RMB100,000 to recompense his investment in her, and Lin has him arrested by the police.
REVIEW
Northeast China-born director Zou Peng 邹鹏 moves way down south to Guangdong for his second feature, Sauna on Moon 嫦娥, in most respects the polar opposite to his first, A North Chinese Girl 东北东北, set in his hometown of Harbin. Where Girl was dark, wintry and selfconsciously arty in style – in retrospect, taking its stylistic cues from the harsher northern setting – Sauna is bright, sweaty and sassy, reflecting its setting in the southern, Cantonese-dominated melting-pot. Underneath the surface of the loosely constructed character drama (set around a gawdy sauna/brothel) there’s still a dark edge – reflected in the seamily-coloured, saturated photography by Hong Kong d.p. Yu Liwei 余力为 of interiors that recalls his own Love Will Tear Us Apart 天上人间 (1999)- but the movie still manages to engage the viewer emotionally in a way that Girl really never did.
That’s largely due to a fine, low-key performance by Wu Yuchi 吴玉迟 as the manager of the gawdy sauna/brothel, an everyday middle-rung entrepreneur juggling the demands of his superiors and “special guests”, a collection of high-maintenance girls from all over, and a local police force that appears to be very malleable. Wu’s character helps to knit together a sprawling script which is basically a collection of incidents set over a couple of years, during which he tries to keep the sauna/brothel afloat and realise his dream of making it a local pleasure palace. The non-professional feel of the performances gives the movie considerable immediacy – once the audience can sort the characters out after a confusing first 15 minutes – with Yang Xiaomin 杨筱敏 excellent as the girls’ madame and Meng Yan 孟艳 touching as a young mother who’d rather be a singer than a hooker.
Apart from being the name of the sauna/brothel, and the unmanned moon probe that China launched in Oct 2010, the film’s Chinese title literally means “The Lady in the Moon”, a goddess from Chinese mythology who endows her worshippers with beauty.
CREDITS
Produced by L’Est Films Group (CN).
Script: Zou Peng. Photography: Yu Liwei. Editing: Li Dongquan [Wenders Li]. Music: Wang Lei. Art direction: Zou Peng. Costumes: Sun Li, Zou Peng. Sound: Si Zhonglin, Zhang Yang. Visual effects: Brilliant Genesis.
Cast: Wu Yuchi (Wu), Yang Xiaomin (Li), Lei Ting (Lei), Zhan Yi (Pink), Meng Yan (Meng Yan).
Premiere: Cannes Film Festival (Critics’ Week), 18 May 2011.
Release: China, tba.
(Review originally published on Film Business Asia, 21 May 2011.)