FLOWERS
OF SHANGHAIFLOWERS
OF SHANGHAI
The movie critics who participated in the Village Voice's 1999 Film Poll collectively voted Hou Hsiao-Hsien the Best Director of the 90's, and, despite the fact that it's extremely limited release likely prevented many critics from seeing it, rated Flowers of Shanghai at #9 among the best films of 1999 (an extremely good year for movies). So the film has some strong admirers. But this painfully deliberate and passion-free study of the intricate social structure in a 19th-century Chinese brothel makes no effort to create characters who inspire either empathy or dislike. The brothel's lavish interiors are rich in color and detail, and Hou's portrait of the politicking for status and "face" among the courtesans and their patrons and both sides' respective entourages of wiser handlers is equally layered. At no point does the viewer much care what will happen to anyone involved, though, and while avoidance of Spielbergian sentimentality is always a hopeful sign for a movie, the utter apathy of the audience is not. The claustrophobic, opium-sleepy weight of the movie's unfolding of its minimally distinguishable characters (who we never see outside the confines of the brothel and almost never see graced by natural light) may, as Hou's devotees insist, embody a reinvigorated contemporay narrative classicism, and may be greatly more meaningful to those more versed in Chinese culture or in Hou's previous work. When, at the movie's end, you are roused from sleep by a fellow filmgoer who's hip to these subtleties, get them to fill you in on all this.