海上花 Flowers of Shanghai 1998 中英双字 Youtube full film English sub, Reviews

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Flowers of Shanghai
2 hours 5 min • 2013
by Berenice Reynaud
October 26, 1985

Based on a famous 19th-century Chinese novel, Hou Hsiao-hsien’s 1998 drama is set in an upscale Shanghai brothel, a claustrophobic artificial paradise where courtesans and their upper-class clients smoke opium, argue about money, and indulge in witty gossip. The film opens with a brilliant seven-minute take; the languid yet precise cinematography throughout gives it the seductive power of a drug-induced dream.
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Short And Sweet:

FLOWERS OF SHANGHAI (1998). So confined in its setting that it easily could have been based on (or turned into) a play, this Taiwanese period piece from director Hou Hsiao-hsien looks at the lives of the women serving as courtesans in four Shanghai brothels (“flower houses”). 

Basically kept prisoner at these establishments, they frequently serve as long-term mistresses to wealthy men and hope that they will eventually be able to buy their freedom and escape this suffocating life. 

The surface splendor and serenity belie the ugly hypocrisy, jealousy and misogyny seething underneath, a dichotomy which gives the film its dramatic charge.

Blu-ray extras include a new making-of documentary; excerpts from a 2015 interview with Hou; and the theatrical trailer.

Movie: ★★★
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A key player in Taiwan’s New Wave, director Hou Hsiao-hsien sews courtesans and their lovers under the haze of oil lamps in one of the 1990s most beautiful films. It’s late-19th century Shanghai, and with the courtesans litertally enclosed in jails until they can buy their way out, the intersecting stories suck you in and leave a scent of opium as betrayal, desire, and freedom in its wake with every turn. Shanghai is made with such sophistication that maybe one viewing won’t be enough to go through the deep layers of emotion between the flower pedals.


Follow me on Twitter: @brian_cine (Cine-A-Man)
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OCTOBER 13, 2004
Flowers of Shanghai (1998): B+

A story of insularity, slavery and sexual politics, Hou Hsiao-hsien’s straightforward period piece Flowers of Shanghai tells the story of four brothel houses (“flower houses”) and the relationships shared between its wealthy patrons and attractive, cunning employees (“flower girls”). 

In 1880s Shanghai, wealthy men spend their days and nights gambling, playing drinking games, feasting and smoking opium in the company of servile beauties who function as their escorts, lovers, and financial benefactors. 

The fragile-looking women project easygoing compliance, yet as Hou’s film reveals, the women are actually unsentimental realists eager to secure their freedom through their dealings with the foolish, hesitant, capricious men they entertain. 

Hou employs no traditional edits throughout his meticulous film (instead, scenes are conjoined by fade-ins and -outs), and his long, unbroken shots – which are set solely inside the opulent brothels, never giving us a glimpse of the outside world – capture the suffocating airlessness of the film’s decadent milieu. 

As Master Wong, a man who suffers after punishing his flower girl by marrying another, Tony Leung exudes a somber, forlorn uncertainty, and Hou eloquently illustrates the unpredictability of passion through a startling third-act scene in which a flower girl’s impulsive attempt to poison her beau ironically leads to marriage. While the drug-addled men ensconce themselves in lavish, ornate whorehouses, their pragmatic female companions covertly plot to escape their extravagant prisons, and as these lovers squabble, cavort and reconcile, Hou – in this, his most accessible film – sympathetically depicts the consuming, love-sick ennui which afflicts both his discontent male and female characters.

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