Abstract
What can you say about a film that sticks your nose in public toilets, literally as well as metaphorically? As Fruit Chan proclaimed at the Question and Answer session after the screening of Public Toilet at this year's Toronto International Film Festival ... this is my shit movie. Fruit Chan's reputation as one of the most interesting directors of the new Hong Kong independent film scene was firmly established by two highly acclaimed 'neo-realist' films that critiqued the 'hard-scrapple' life in Hong Kong after repatriation. Little Cheung (1999) and Durian Durian (2000) were both screened in 2000 at the TIFF, although due to an unfortunate mix-up the version of Durian Durian had Italian subtitles only. The third film in his 'prostitute' trilogy, Hollywood Hong Kong (2001), not shown in Toronto, continued in the same realist vein as the previous two, with the addition, however, of one of the most ingenious yet off-putting pre-film title sequences that I have ever seen.... the titles and credits stamped (branded?) onto the pink flesh of slaughtered pigs being transported in a truck by 2 overweight men and an equally fat young boy. While the grossness of the imagery prepared the viewer for the coarse realities of the narrative of Hollywood Hong Kong, in retrospect, it also gave promise of the more scatological effects to come in Chan's next film. Public Toilet is undeniably about toilets: in Beijing, where the most primitive kind of public toilet ... an open room with seats facing each other ... serves as a communal centre for socializing as well as birthing and dying; in Korea, where the toilet in an outhouse becomes the home for an 'Ocean girl' ill from eating polluted fish waste; in the Indian city of Benares, itself a public toilet whose inhabitants relieve themselves freely in the streets; its river, the Ganges, revealed as a conduit for human dirt and waste, notwithstanding its purported powers of healing; in Hong Kong, where an Indian family tends a public toilet; and in a public washroom in New York City, where a homeless man inadvertently intervenes in a mob hit with tragic results. In fact, much of Public Toilet appears to be intentionally distasteful, in an 'epater le bourgeois' kind of way. We are confronted with shots of rivers of urine through which people swim; a glass of urine which a young man is coaxed into drinking; discussions of 'virgin's golden urine' as a potential cure-all; a story recounted of a court doctor who diagnosed health by observing and sniffing the patient's bowel movements; a hand pulling a newborn baby (a very obvious doll, thank goodness) out of the pit of a public toilet; documentary-type shots of people in the Indian sequences bringing their dead down to the river and burning them, with the camera lingering on the shreds of burned flesh. …
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