Flowers of Shanghai (1998)

Very best movie i ever watch

Don't listen to the Hype. It's awful

While it doesn't offer any answers, it both thrills and makes you think.

One of the worst ways to make a cult movie is to set out to make a cult movie.

First, a disclaimer: I love so-called "art films", from Cocteau and Eisenstein to David Lynch and Krystof Kieslowski. I have a long attention span and am willing to extend considerable effort towards appreciating any work of art.Having said that, The Flowers of Shanghai was largely a disappointment. Yes, the sets and costuming are sumptuous. True, the mood evoked by the film is seductive. And the subject matter--the relationships between courtesans and their clients--is at least provocative. But for a number of reasons, Hou fails to deliver a film that rises above those elements.The reasons are many. First, the plot is minimal--hardly compelling--mostly relying upon the petty machinations between the courtesans and the clients who try not to become too involved with them. But such a minimal plot can only engage if we become involved in the characters, and this is very difficult to do.That's problem number two: the characters simply aren't compelling. The men tend to be equivocal and emotionally distant. The women tend to be shallow and manipulative. Since there are essentially no close-up shots, and the physical expressions are very restrained, we have no sense of people's emotional states. There is not one character that we can really care about.Third: the editing is leisurely. Really leisurely. Glacial. Very few directors can pull off a five minute interior shot with almost no dialogue or action; Ozu was one. But Hou--although better than many contemporary directors--isn't up to Ozu's level by a long shot. Hou's scenes, unlike Ozu's, don't so much engender our contemplation as they engender tedium. A director has to be able to recognize when a scene has come to the end of its life; this he doesn't seem to be able to do.A note to the curious: every shot in this film is an interior shot; you never see the outdoors--not even the sky through the windows. And despite the subject matter and the warnings of adult content on the box, there are no sex scenes; there is no nudity. Structure-wise, the film depicts three activities: men playing "rock, paper, scissors" around a table, people having their little dramas in private, and people brooding.That's basically it.I would like to be able to say that The Flowers of Shanghai was more than just a 2-hours-plus visual curiosity, but it simply isn't. And more the shame because of its wasted potential.

I bought this movie--oh, pardon me, "film"--because I am fascinated with Chinese culture. And because I have a new, Chinese lady in my life. I thought my having this movie would impress her, in the unlikely event that my charm wasn't sufficient! I must also confess that the beautiful cover of the DVD case (which is also depicted at IMDb) in the video store seduced me. I'm such a sucker for shrewd marketing. "A visually ravishing masterpiece...One of the most beautiful films ever made", proclaims the endorsement on the cover. In addition, to a westerner, anything with the word "Shanghai" in it seems to evoke romantic images of far away places--far away places which when visited, more often than not, make one yearn for home. Alas. The grass is always greener on the other side.The entire movie was shot indoors, probably on a budget of $10,000, in the drawing rooms of brothels, with rather poor lighting to boot. Oh, I know the candle-lit ambience was intentional. Still, it was rather hard on the eyes. A ray of sunlight would have been a welcome relief.It is essentially a series of vignettes about the relationships between Chinese hookers, their johns & mesdames, to put it bluntly. Petty jealousies, whining, conniving & duplicity abound. From FOS, I learned that women in 1880s Shanghai were just as catty as women in 2000s Winnipeg, Canada. The hookers spend much of their time pouting that their johns weren't paying off their old debts fast enough. Chinese men of that era were, apparently, just as naïve & dumb as Canadian men today, a sad fact to which I can attest from experience. (I don't know about you guys, but now when I meet a woman who even hints that I should pay her bills, I bolt.)Obviously, the director has studied Ingmar Bergman well: FOS is just as uninspiring as Bergman's depressing "masterpieces". One user gushes that this movie's cinematography "can be simply orgasmic at times". Yeah, right. Unfortunately, there wasn't one orgasm had during the movie's plodding two hour plus run time. At least that might have awoken me from my slumber as I struggled to maintain interest in the movie.This ain't no "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon", believe me. Now THAT is a movie, eh? Action! Adventure! Romance! Unrequited love! The folly of youth! The folly of middle-age! FOS is more like a dirge compared to that movie. It is what you'd get if Igmar Bergman were to direct an episode of Masterpiece Theatre. (Is that still running? I dunno, 'cause I haven't watched TV in eight years.) I suffered through about an hour of FOS until I couldn't take any more.So much for "films". Give me a good ol' movie any day, thank you. Long live the Coen brothers! And Spielberg! This one's going back to the video store--that is, if they're stupid enough to take it back.

This is something strange to explain; it's a very aesthetic film. It's certainly very slow for many people, but if you get in it, you lose track of time because it is so much fascinating. A strange sensation. A really beautiful film in all my heart. This is these sorts of films you love more and more when you watch them.If you like cinema, don't miss it. You won't regret it.

Hou Hsiao-Hsien's "Flowers of Shanghai" is an opium dream of a movie: visually and aurally there is no mistaking that this is the work of an artist with the imagination of a poet, and the precision of a clockmaker. The opening shot is among the most exquisite in all of cinema: a veritable tour de force that exudes Hou's love for the film medium, but is decidedly restrained and controlled, never allowing style to upstage the narrative and degenerate into mere spectacle. In keeping with the film's setting and rules of patriarchy, the major male characters are introduced first. The women serving these men are then introduced in the following "chapters", each one preceded by title cards announcing their names and place of residence as if gently mocking or subverting the patriarchical order.This chamberpiece drama of sexual intrigue and power struggle is astonishingly acute in capturing the feel and sensibilities of the late 19th century but expressed in very contemporary terms without any apparent compromises or contradictions. The painterly colors of "Flowers" may invite comparison with Dutch masters like Vermeer even when Hou is deliberately conjuring an idealized world that is as hermetic as it is artificial: a world composed entirely without natural light is like a dream, hauntingly beautiful and intense but impossible to hold or to keep. That the film is shot entirely indoors and the mise-en-scene is orchestrated without any close-ups is a testament of Hou's faith and supreme confidence in creating a work that remains completely cinematic while averting the pitfalls of feeling stage bound. Despite the subject matter what is also startling is the complete absence of physical sex on screen; and, yet the film manages to sustain an erotically charged atmosphere.Beginning with "The Puppetmaster" Hou has been increasingly moving towards a more minimalist form of cinema, stripping the narrative of everything that is superfluous until nothing is left but its emotional core, naked and unadulterated. "Flowers" is very much an interior film that does not depend on voiceover narration to make thoughts explicit. Hou's almost static camera continues to favor long medium takes ranging from 5 to 7 minutes, framing key characters sharing the same space and time, but well within reach of each other, capturing the subtle interplay and nuances while allowing them to drift in and out of the picture frame according to their relative importance in the social hierarchy. In this manner an entire community is evoked: demonstrating that the window to the world is precisely through the interior lives of individuals responsible for shaping the body politic.