Public Toilet

Nowhere near as scatological as you might expect from seeing Fruit Chan’s earlier movies, this mini-epic finds Hong Kong’s most independent-minded auteur in thoughtful mood, contemplating the accidents of fate and the vagaries of free-will from the other side of the U-bend. Thoughtful, but as playful as ever. It all begins in an unusually clean public toilet in Beijing, the birthplace of Dongdong, who consequently has to live with the nickname ‘God of Toilets.’ Now 18, he’s faced with the impending death of the kind old lady who found and raised him, and the departure of his best friend Tony in search of a miracle cure for his kid brother, who’s seriously ill. Already complicated by everything from snow which mysterious falls upwards to the two grizzled bachelors who have spent their whole lives as rivals for the old lady’s hand, the storyline now turns into a veritable garden of forking paths. Most of the characters either need or are looking for miracle cures. There’s a multilingual young woman who says that she’s a sea creature, the dyed-blond Korean boy who tries to help her, two Cantonese-speaking Indian boys bathing in the Ganges, a romantic hitman outwitted in New York, a runaway Portaloo in Pusan… and much besides. The wit and wisdom of Fruit Chan, in fact, in a sprawling global package. Tony Rayns