Made as a guerilla project while waiting for finance for R U There. Verbeek, a Tiger candidate in 2008 with Shanghai Trance, proves that his creative production is on the rise and that China seems an endless source of inspiration in this drama about a gigolo club for nouveau riche women in Shanghai.
After the Tiger Award-nominated Shanghai Trance, and before the film R U There, that was shot in Taipei, David Verbeek shot Club Zeus. The film shows a phenomenon we hardly know in the West: a club with ‘host boys’ who pamper rich women by taking on any desired personality. Mysterious, sexy, interested and if necessary willing to go to bed with their clients.
Club Zeus fulfils fantasies for women from the economic top layer in Shanghai and the host boys are paid per bottle of champagne sold. Neatly dressed and with the adopted names of Western film stars, they play their roles in the hope of earning more than the others every night. Because in the megacity of Shanghai, everything is a contest.
Verbeek shows the glamour of night life as a cocoon, closed off from the outside world. It’s an enormous contrast with the bare apartments of the boys, where they hardly spend any time. ‘The electricity meter must be broken,’ says a landlord. ‘Because you don’t seem to use any power.’
A Short Profile of David Verbeek, by Muffin Hix, student MA Film Curating at the London Consortium:
Originally from Amsterdam but having lived and worked in Shanghai for some time, David Verbeek is now back in Europe and divides his time between Paris and Amsterdam. He makes films that are striking for their deft, insightful renderings of young people searching for connection, meaning and authenticity in an increasingly alienating, digitally-paced world. Although often located in monumental, teeming cities, Verbeek’s films contain a certain quietness and reflection, creating a refuge (but also an isolation) for his characters. Cast in the unreal glow of computer screens and neon lights or reflected in high-rise windows, they are constantly changing and reconciling what it is to be human and to love in a dispassionate modern world.
Verbeek had made several shorts, including Claustrophobia (1998), Void (1999), Getting Closer (2000) and Tussen sfeer (2001),by the time his feature debut Beat (2004) was selected for Rotterdam in 2005 while he was still a student at the Netherlands Film and Television Academy, and the director has continued to have a strong presence at the IFFR with both short and feature films. He participated as part of CineMart in 2007 and also with Melody Z, an evocative and intimate 20-minute short following a Shanghai clubber whose feelings of longing and need to communicate are subsumed and reflected in the rapidly changing city around her. 2008 saw Verbeek return with his second feature, Shanghai Trance, which earned a Tiger Award Nomination and was also notable as the first Dutch film to screen widely across China. The film again takes up the themes of emotional and physical struggle in the metropolis, chronicling the lives of three young couples seeking love and validity in the uncertain, industrial city.
The success of Shanghai Trance was followed shortly by the innovative R U There being selected as part of Un Certain Regard in Cannes 2010. With 20 percent of the film occurring in the digital world of 'Second Life', the film is the story of a Dutch gamer’s search for a human connection with a girl he meets in Taipei, raising questions about how we are all changing in this increasingly digitized, impersonal world. The world première of his latest film Club Zeus - which he also wrote and edited with long time collaborator Sander Vos - is being presented as part of this year’s ‘Return of the Tiger’ programme. The film, shot in just 10 days, centers on a group of host boys who exist in a world of lies, manipulations and false love in a club for wealthy women in Shanghai..