This is a story about Liu, who works in a massage parlor (mostly just foot massages) for boss Lin Dong. After getting drunk with a friend from work who was fired, she gets raped by Lin Dong. It turns out, Lin's husband An Kun, a window cleaner just happening to be cleaning the windows at the time and witnessing this, tries to extort money from the boss. Liu becomes pregnant and there is a question of the unborn baby's paternity. Since the boss's wife Wang Mei is unable to bear children, Lin Dong wants badly to be a father, and makes a deal with the girl and her husband, that if its his baby, he'll keep it and give the couple $100,000 yuan. The film is at first farcical due to its unusual premise. It then becomes a strange morality play, that telling lies turns to pain. Beijing is pictured in every outdoor frame of the film as bustling, with constant high rise construction going on. However, I don't see specifically what relevance it has to the story, except to highlight haves and have nots (and want a lot mores). No joke here, it could have been "lost" in any decent sized city in the world. The real problem here is that there are no characters to like, except, to an extent, the wife of the boss, Wang Mei. This film, by the end, filled me with more indifference than pity or hope. I get it, money probably is everything. Everyone in this film made their bed and is now lying in it (the pun is completely intentional). If you have seen the actors in other films and like them, by all means go see this film. However, if you're not a giant fan of films made in mainland China, I'd skip it.
