where will you be tomorrow?

Audie 2022-02-27 08:01:44

The fool Erming sent a postcard to Daming. The picture on it made Daming anxious and returned to Beijing from Guangdong. When I came back, I found out that my father was not dead. As for my father, after knowing the reason for Daming's return, he was stunned for a while, and said, "It's good that you can come back to see your brother."


The return of Daming brought us into the bathhouse and brought changes to the unchanging bathhouse. Daming has been changing the date of his flight back to the south, and the demolition office has been going back and forth to notify the demolition. The old man was stunned for a while, and said, let's take a step by step. However, changes are clearly in sight.

The film runs through the contrast of stability and change. The patrons of the steam room in the bathhouse come every day, playing chess, cupping, pedicures, and fighting crickets. But they also know that "people can't get sick at this age". I don't know when it will start, the number of regular customers will be less and less. The old man and Erming must go for a run every night and have a competition. The old man and the two happily go back to the bathhouse to end their day. The next day, I got up with the early broadcast, burned a boiler, steamed towels, mopped the floor, turned over the service sign and opened the door to welcome guests. This kind of life is simple and beautiful, just like the peaceful past, naturally.

However, this stability came to an abrupt end with the death of the old man. The previously unresolved changes are now as dazzling as the broken tiles in a drained bath. What about Erming? The bathhouse could not be kept, and the patrons were about to part. An anxiety gradually became stronger. This anxiety is like my sun that cannot sing after turning off the water valve. It is the anxiety and helplessness in the face of changing situations. But there is no way, what should come will always come.

Erming didn't understand this change, or he resisted it. He mopped the floor, he flipped the sign, he rubbed the opera boy, he lifted the hose like a gladiator to repel the movers. He soaked in the bathtub and remembered the story about the bath that the old man told. For him, bathing is his life. The bathroom is Dad.

The old customers finally left, and the old men decided not to raise crickets because they lost their spirit. The old people used the DV to record the busyness of the bulldozer, and the little fat man plugged the Walkman into Erming and waved goodbye to him. Later he will sing my sun under his own water heater sprinkler. But this is bound to be tedious. Erming stood in the empty bath, listening to his Walkman, and shouted out indistinctly, "My father!"

But, where will Er Ming be tomorrow? A better new life, will it come? That's the question the film asks at the end of the century. Ten years later, can this question be answered? can not.

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Extended Reading
  • Parker 2022-03-20 09:02:57

    Good subject matter, badly shot. In comparison, Jia Zhangke's bathing shots are even more lonely

  • Kassandra 2022-03-18 09:01:09

    A few paragraphs are not only too long, but unnecessary. It seems to be sublimated by the worship of water by people in the water-deficient areas in the west, but that has nothing to do with people's nostalgia for the bathhouse. On the contrary, it is not as good as the section of the bathhouse in the later "The Undertaker". Is Jiang Wu's water gun a tribute to watering gardeners? And the yellow earth?