Flowers of Shanghai

Third viewing: November 2000 at Brooklyn Academy of Music  Full Details

Second viewing: March 3, 2000 at the Pacific Film Archive

The original review can be found below.

Seeing it again, I am convinced that it is one of the greatest films ever made.  It does things to me that no other film has -- a sustained sensation of being completely part of the world I am watching, but neither an outsider observer nor a participant.  I am there but I feel languorously trapped in this world of opium smoke and female beauty.  And I believe that is exactly how Master Wang (Tony Leung Chi Wai) feels as he comes night after night, regarding Crimson (the gorgeous Michiko Hada), the girl he once loved deeply, and perhaps still loves, though he knows he can never have her.

These may be some of the most subtle but endearing scenes of love ever filmed; certainly they are among the most tragic.  There is a profound, lived-in feeling to their scenes together, which are dominated by silence and mundane actions: lighting the opium pipe, playing with jewelry, avoiding each other's looks.  He had already proposed to her some time ago; her parents disapproved of the match, so we are told.  Who knows what the real reasons are for why things are as they are -- what we know clearly from their actions is that they have known each other well for quite some time, and yet they hardly know each other now.  He has begun seeing another hostess, and he is not even sure why.  Maybe to regain a sense of the innocence of a new love before it is tainted.  Too late: he can never regain that purity, and somewhere deep inside he realizes it.  The rest is just a matter of waiting for things to happen.  Things had happened to get him to this miserable point; surely other things will get him out.  

Unfortunately, it's not that easy for the ladies, who depend on the men completely to support them.  Quite a few, like Crimson, take that dependency too much to heart, and it leads to their undoing.  Others, like Pearl, daughter of the brothel madam, take the affairs of the house on a strictly professional level, keeping peace between the bickering younger girls.  And occasionally, one will escape, buying her own freedom, as we see in Emerald (the stately Michelle Reis). Interestingly, the film only has three scenes shot with exterior light, two of which involve her as she deals her way out of the brothel. 

The ending, which had caught me off-guard the first time around, resonates much more richly this time.  A young prostitute has fallen in love with a boy who promised to marry her.  Then he is arranged to marry another girl.  After the prostitute attempts to kill him, the boy asks an elder to broker a solution.  The elder arranges for the prostitute to be married to someone else, with the boy paying her dowry.  This settlement should resolve matters, the elder insists.  The boy agrees, but then keeps asking, "Who will she marry?"  And so, the cycle of fate vying against love begins again.

But even in this house of love, fate -- and money, its engine -- rule the day.  It is a certainty that people will watch Flowers of Shanghai expecting things to happen, in the traditional system of conflict, climax and resolution.  But such dramatic movement isn't the point of this story.  After watching it you realize that the ending had been settled from the very beginning.  All that is left to do is wait it out, in a opium-hazed chamber of a beautiful girl with whom you can fulfill your fantasies for a night, but never for a lifetime.  You couldn't ask for an experience of waiting any better, or worse, than this.

Quick notes on composition:

- Slowly swaying camera movements give a surreal impression of space and movement; combined with the dim lantern light, it seems as if the characters are ghosts who have emerged from some deep recess of history.  And how much of these tragic ancient love stories still apply today?  How much of our modern love is a merely a matter of commodities and commerce?

- Shots are usually at waist level and ceilings are never visible in any shots except towards the end. Helps give unique sensation of being seated inside the room with other characters.

- Masterful composition of characters in relation to their importance to each other: in several scenes the more important or powerful characters stand in foreground with two or three layers of people spread over the middle and background.   Subtle but effective.

Original viewing: January 14, 2000 at the Asian Art Museum

Flowers of Shanghai opens with one of the most stunning long takes I have ever seen.  A group of men of vastly varying ages play drinking games around a table while their ladies-in-waiting sit, each slightly behind their man, each a showpiece and an attendant.  Behind the ladies stand a dozen more servant girls attending the ladies.  An elaborate system is unveiled before our eyes, but it takes several minutes of the camera slowly panning back and forth across this single small table before we see the layers, visually and socially, embedded in this scene.  

One shouldn't mind at all how long this scene takes, because every one of the ladies and servant girls are stunningly beautiful -- though each has their place in this table, just as each patron is fixed in his position.  Everything is beautiful and yet rigidly staged -- and so the tone of the film, sad and lurid, is set: that in this beautiful flower house, where beauty can be bought and desires are fulfilled, rules are strictly enforced to keep order.  

The slow panning of the camera in each scene, without the use of a single cut, gives the film a lengthy, meditative feel. Set exclusively in the densely red interiors of the brothel, the languorous visuals had a narcotic effect on me -- I felt like I was in a psycho-visual haze.  In no other film have I felt that a movie could be such a drug -- and somehow the effect serves the meaning of this film exactly.  For these sad men, going to the brothel means an escape from whatever insignificant daily lives they have to enter the fulfillment of their fantasies.  And just like with a movie like this one, when it is over and we return to the world of daylight, we pay the price for our ecstasy with a feeling of great loss, as if our souls have been emptied out. 

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