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| Hai shang hua / Flowers of Shanghai |
海上花 / Hǎishàng Huā.
Director: Hou Hsiao-hsien. Year: 1998. Country: Taiwan / Japan. Sog.: dal romanzo The Sing-Song Girls of Shanghai (1892) di Han Bangqing. Scen.: Eileen Chang, Chen Tien-wen. F.: Ping Bin Lee. M.: Ching-Song Liao. Scgf.: Wen-Ying Huang. Mus.: Yoshihiro Hanno.
Int.: Tony Chiu-wai Leung (Wang), Michiko Hada (Crimson), Michelle Reis (Emerald), Carina Lau (Pearl), Jack Kao (Luo), Vicky Wei (Jasmin), Hsuan Fang (Jade), Annie Shizuka Inoh (Golden Flower), Ming Hsu (Tao).
Prod.: Shozo Ichiyama, Yang Teng-kuei per 3H Productions, Shochiku. DCP. D.: 113’. Col.
In Cantonese and Shanghainese.
Restored in 4K in 2019 by Shochiku in collaboration with Shanghai International Film Festival with funding provided by Jaeger-LeCoultreat at the L’Immagine Ritrovata laboratory from the 35 mm original negative.
Copy from Shochiku.
Cantonese version with English subtitles.
Recovered & Restored.
Viewed at Cinema Arlecchino, Bologna, Il Cinema Ritrovato, 27 June 2019.
Jonathan Rosenbaum (Il Cinema Ritrovato): "Hou Hsiao-hsien’s 1998 feature, his 13th, represents a bold departure from his previous work. It’s his first film to be set completely outside Taiwan, the implicit or explicit subject of his earlier movies – most noticeably in his trilogy comprising City of Sadness (1989), The Puppetmaster (1993), and Good Men, Good Women (1995), but also in the bittersweet allegory of Son’s Big Doll, his seminal contribution to the 1983 sketch feature The Sandwich Man. After focusing mostly on families and landscapes, Hou fashions a chamberpiece set exclusively in the interiors of Shanghai brothels in the late 19th century, adapted from a novel by Han Bangqing by his usual screenwriter Chen Tien-wen."
"And after Hou showed striking stylistic affinities with Yasujiro Ozu, here’s a film whose long takes, camera movements, and concentration on sex work suggest a Kenji Mizoguchi but without the melodrama. But insofar as Hou’s previous films deal with existential and historical questions of identity related to Taiwan as a country, occupied and colonized at various times and in various ways by China, Japan, and the US, Hai shang hua finds similar issues arising from interactions between prostitutes (the ‘flower girls’), their madams (or ‘aunts’), and their wealthy and powerful customers."
"It’s characteristic of Hou’s distanced approach to power, economics, and sentiment that he doesn’t include actual sex among these interactions, focusing instead on conversations lubricated by food, tea, and opium. He also disperses our attention between various brothels, flower girls, madams, and patrons without persuading us to regard any of them as primary." Jonathan Rosenbaum
AA: Mysteriously, Flowers of Shanghai has never been released in Finland or other Nordic countries, nor has there been a telecast in Finland.
Having never seen it before I was very much looking forward to what the most distinguished connoisseurs consider the masterpiece of Hou Hsiao-hsien, one of the greatest contemporary directors.
The sole milieux are brothels, reminiscent of films by Kenji Mizoguchi such as Akasen chitai. Jean Renoir's Nana is different, being a story of a freelancing courtesan. In Max Ophuls's adaptation of "La Maison Tellier" in his Guy de Maupassant triptych Le Plaisir, also on this year's Bologna agenda, the sex workers are having a weekend off in the countryside.
Seeing Flowers of Shanghai for the first time I felt like one of the hapless gentlemen circling around the locked doors of La Maison Tellier in the beginning of the Maupassant-Ophuls story.
The plot is complex and hard / impossible to make sense of on first viewing. Beyond the jump break I have copied the Wikipedia synopsis. The characters are opaque and impossible to relate to. It was an evening screening and the last film of the day, but I was alert, yet remained a stranger to the world of this film, composed of 38 immaculate long takes, often in plan-séquence style, familiar from early cinema.
The English subtitles are credited in the original film credits to Tony Rayns, but after the screening Tony was furious because his work had been ignored and replaced by an inferior set of subtitles. After the festival Tony reported that this is being corrected. He told that he had worked closely with Chen Tien-wen to get the nuances right in the dialogue based on the original novel's Wu, a now rare variety of Chinese unintelligible to Mandarin or Cantonese speakers, including Hou himself.
Tony Rayns confirmed that it is possible to make sense of the plot, but it is not necessary for the appreciation of the film which is essentially about the Tony Leung character's butterfly flight among the four flower houses and their various flower girls.
For me the immortal cinematic accounts of women of pleasure are the ones by Mizoguchi, Renoir and Ophuls, both in their vibrant joy of life and their desolate sense of a dead end. In this festival we also saw Mauritz Stiller's version of the theme in Song of the Scarlet Flower. When Olof meets Elli the Gazelle as a prostitute in a brothel, it's the nadir of his wandering years and the turning-point in his life, a wake-up call that it's finally time for the boy to become a man. As previously, Olof wants to do the right thing with Elli, but it's too late. As directed by Stiller, the sequence is poignant and original, free of cliché.
Visually, Flowers of Shanghai is almost oppressively stylish and cultivated, with a painterly approach to appealing colours. Even the colour world expresses the "flowers and butterflies" theme. The visual world also feels stifling and lifeless. Tony Rayns commented after the screening that the girls live in vacuum, completely isolated, in an opium drugged state, and the airless quality is how the film is meant to look.
The 2019 digital transfer is spotless. Photochemical grain has been polished away so that the images do not breathe. I spoke with connoisseurs who know the film well in 35 mm, and they all found the digital transfer perfect and faithful to the original.
WIKIPEDIA: SYNOPSIS AND CAST
In four elegant brothels, called "Flower Houses", in fin-de-siècle 19th-century Shanghai (Qing dynasty), we see several affairs. Events presumably take place in 1884, a year named in one of the scenes. The action involves four men who live for pleasure pursuing a number of courtesans, and takes place mostly in the light of oil lamps.
The courtesans are known as Crimson, Pearl, Emerald, Jasmin and Jade. Crimson belongs to the Huifang Enclave (薈芳里) brothel. Pearl and Jade work in the Gongyang Enclave (公陽里) brothel. Emerald resides in the Shangren Enclave (尚仁里) brothel, and Jasmin works at the East Hexing Enclave (東合興里) brothel. The relationship between the wealthy patrons and the courtesans are semi-monogamous, frequently lasting many years.
The courtesans are purchased at an early age by the owners of the brothels, known as "aunties". In spite of the trappings of luxury and the wealth surrounding them, the graceful, well-bred courtesans live lives of slavery. The girls, and especially those with less forgiving aunties, are frequently beaten for misbehavior, though such beatings are not seen in the film. Because of the oppressive social conventions, the best that the courtesans, known as "flower girls", can hope for is to pay off their debts some day (often by aid of a wealthy patron) or marry into a better social position.
Much of the film concerns the silent Master Wang who leaves the courtesan Crimson after their 2 and-a-half-year relationship in favor of the younger courtesan Jasmin, with whom he has fallen in love. He offers to settle Crimson's debts as compensation for leaving her, as he is her only caller and her only source of income. Crimson is in dire need of money, as she is the sole provider of her entire family. They agree to a settlement. However, Master Wang still has feelings for Crimson. When he finds out she is having an affair with an actor, he launches into a drunken rage. He marries Jasmin and, promoted, departs for Guangdong. It is later rumored that Wang has struck Jasmin, who responded by attempting suicide.
Emerald was bought for 100 dollars by her auntie as a child. Master Luo wants to help but her freedom costs many times that value. The negotiation goes on throughout the film, and with the help of Master Hong and Emerald, Luo was finally able to negotiate a satisfactory price and took Emerald away from the brothel.
Another courtesan, Jade, has been promised by her lover, the young and immature Master Zhu, that if they cannot be married together, they will die together. When it is apparent that the marriage will not occur, she gives Zhu opium in an attempt to poison him. He spits it out and is aided by other girls as Jade, in a bout of contempt and anger, is restrained. Ultimately Master Zhu paid a hefty $10,000 so that Jade can buy out her contract and be married off as proper woman.
Tony Leung Chiu-wai Wang
Michiko Hada Crimson (沈小紅)
Vicky Wei (魏筱惠) Jasmin (張蕙貞)
Carina Lau Pearl (周雙珠)
Shuan Fang Jade (周雙玉)
Michelle Reis Phoenix (黃翠鳳)
Jack Kao Luo
Rebecca Pan Huang
Annie Yi Golden Flower
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