
When I’m tasked with watching and reviewing 10 Criterion movies each year, my fear usually isn’t that one of the movies I watch will be bad. After all, Criterion has such a proven track record as cinephile tastemakers, that they rarely put a film in the collection that doesn’t have at least some artistic or cultural significance. That’s why the biggest fear for me is watching a film where I recognize the artistic merit of the film and can easily see why it would encompass Criterion’s aims of “gathering the greatest films from around the world”, but I just don’t connect with it. Flowers of Shanghai is certainly that kind of film, where I see why it’s innovative from a storytelling and filmmaking perspective, but I wasn’t all that emotionally invested in it.
The film is set in the upper-class brothels of Shanghai in the 1880s, where much opium is smoked, good times are had by the men who hang out here, and the maidens have a somewhat more monogamous relationship with their johns than your typical prostitute. The patron of these brothels that we focus on the most is Master Wang (played by Tony Leung Chu Wai), who leaves the prostitute Crimson (Michiko Hada) after they’ve been together for a few years after she refuses his hand in marriage. He then starts courting a younger prostitute named Jasmin (Vicky Wei), which makes Crimson jealous. Wang, however, finds that he still has feelings for her, as he flies into a drunken rage when he finds out Crimson has begun a new affair with an actor. We also follow a few other johns and prostitutes (with flower-themed names) throughout the film, but honestly, I had a hard time keeping track of any of their discernable traits or storylines.
So yeah, I had a hard time with the plot of this movie. Flowers of Shanghai is apparently set in multiple brothels, but I thought it was just set in one the entire time, because the film is completely made up of interior shots, as we never leave the confines of the brothel(s). This was done because director Hou Hsiao-Hsien originally wanted to film the movie in China, but an application wasn’t approved by the Chinese government, so they ended up filming it all in Taiwan without any exteriors. Which, in theory I don’t hate. The very insular nature of the movie, where we’re spending a lot of time in a series of meticulously conceived rooms lit by oil lamps is quite pleasing to look at. But I think it also feeds into the film having little in the way of something tactile for the audience to grab onto.
Don’t get me wrong, the movie looks great. The extensive use of oil lamps for lighting gives it that Barry Lyndon-esque historical realism combined with a warmth that easily communicates why these guys would want to spend so much time in these “pleasure dens”. The film also uses extended long takes, where the camera slowly glides around a room, capturing each character’s behavior, before slowly fading out and then fading back into the next scene, which is also another extended long shot. This style was supposed to give the film the feeling of an opium high, which in theory is cool and I would probably say is achieved if I had ever tried opium.
But this gets at why the movie is so hard to get invested in — it’s just too specific to its time and place. Maybe I would have an easier time appreciating the film if I knew more about Chinese history, but no one smokes opium anymore, no one has committed relationships with their prostitutes anymore, and when the film has so much of its drama happening offscreen, it’s hard to relate to these people at all. Still, you can appreciate the attention to period detail to some extent, since the sets and costuming is immaculate, to the point where it feels like the movie maybe does too good of a job of placing you in these rooms in 1880s Shanghai.
Anyways, I don’t feel like getting too much into the details of why I couldn’t get into this movie, since I’m probably wrong about it. Not that this is one of the ubiquitous modern classics of world cinema or anything, though it did end up being number 3 on The Village Voice‘s best films of the ’90s, for whatever that’s worth. I think I was just interested in seeing another Hou Hsiao-hsien movie, since he’s been heralded alongside past Criterion Month favorite Edward Yang as one of the instigators of the Taiwanese New Wave movement. I’d only previously seen Hou’s 2015 film The Assassin, his last film before retiring, and had a pretty similar reaction to it: detached admiration. But hey, that’s another underrated aspect of Criterion Month — finding out that some esteemed directors just aren’t your cup of tea, or rather, aren’t your pipe of opium.