Dir: Zou Peng
2011
**
I recently attended a special Q&A screening of Zou Peng's Sauna on Moon or Chang'E as it is also known as. I was rather excited, as not only was the producer present at the screening but Zou Peng himself would be joining us via satellite to answer questions. I was sure that I'd have a few. Sauna on Moon tells a tale of a Sauna owner, Boss Wu, who expands his business to keep up with China's recent reform, the sex industry being one of the key areas gaining success. Wu looks after and cares for his girls and prepares them so that they can make as much money as possible but in the end we see that maybe he is a little too caring for this line of work and progress is a little too fast for some. Indeed, is it really progress. Now, the film does get this message across and also has a little bit of Chinese mythology in there for good measure but it comes at a cost. The film is 45 minutes too long, not a good thing for a 90 minute film. The film could have ended on a high several times but Zou Peng just didn't know when to end it. The 'dream like' essence that Peng has tried to achieve just doesn't work and is completely unnecessary, it's as if he had a film in mind and got continuously sidetracked and lost concentration and focus. It's quite boring when it should have been rather captivating. I'm afraid due to poor translation and the fact we had woken poor Mr. Peng up at 3.30am the Q&A didn't really answer anyone's questions. There were an awful lot of Chinese people in the audience though, so I asked a few what they thought of it and they all said it was a rubbish film but they were happy to just see a little bit of home on film. This made for an even more sad experience for me. It's not without merit as there are some great scenes here and the symbolic stuff with the rabbits was lovely but a masterpiece it is not.
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