FLOWERS OF SHANGHAI
DIRECTOR: HOU HSIAO-HSIEN
113 minutes. TAIWAN, japan. 1998. Languages: SHANGHAINESE, CANTONESE. Subtitled. COLOUR.
ORIGINAL TITLE: HAI SHANG HUA
Official Competition, Cannes International Film Festival 1998; Winner: Best Art Direction and Jury Award, Golden Horse Film Festival 1999
presented in digital 4K restoration for the Lunar New Year 2025: Year of the Snake
IFI DUBLIN: sat 18 jan 12.00 noon
BOOK TICKETS: IFI DUBLIN
Screening in partnership with DUBLIN LUNAR NEW YEAR FESTIVAL and Asia Market
PÁLÁS GALWAY: WED 29 JAN 18.30
BOOK TICKETS: PÁLÁS GALWAY
TRISKEL CORK: THU 30 JAN 18.00
BOOK TICKETS: TRISKEL CORK
Flowers of Shanghai is hypnotic human comedy based on Han Ziyun’s masterpiece novel, Hai Shang Hua, first published in 1894. Directed by Taiwanese master director Hou Hsiao-Hsien (EAFFI guest of honour, 2017) and scripted by Chu Tien-Wen, it depicts life in the elegant brothels known as ‘flower houses’ found in small areas of Shanghai’s foreign concessions in the late Qing dynasty in 1884, the only places where prominent figures in Chinese society could be received by women known as ‘flower girls’. The opulent splendour of this enclosed’ world has its own codes, money negotiations, romantic intrigues, jealousies and tensions, reflecting a society as a whole – the courtesans who live confined in a gilded cage, obliged to work to redeem their freedom, hopefully becoming wives to their suitors.
In Hou’s most star-studded film, Tony Leung (In the Mood for Love) plays Master Wang, a senior official working for the Foreign Affairs, entangled in relationships with two courtesans, his longtime mistress Crimson (Michiko Hada) and the younger Jasmin (Vicky Wei) who he lavishes with gifts. Told in a series of vignettes shot by gifted cinematographer Mark Lee Ping-Bing (Hou’s long time collaborator and EAFFI guest of honour, 2018!), the camera moves slowly through lush golden-looking gas-lit interiors in long, exquisite takes which fade quietly to black. Like an illusory, dreamy world that looks like an oil painting, Lee captures in close-range details of the smallest gestures and facial expressions, in what he described as a ‘glamorous realism’, where opium consumption dilates time and plunges the characters into a state of reverie and melancholy. This is one of Hou’s most celebrated and stunning works.