Flowers of Shanghai
(Hai shang hua)

Asian cinema has left us many cinephile memories of brothels, bawdy houses and club hostesses, whatever the motives of these many key films, from Kenji Mizoguchi to Stanley Kwan. Flowers of Shanghai could be seen as their meeting point. Between two films on Taiwanese youth, Goodbye South, Goodbye and Millennium Mambo, and just before leaping into the new millennium, Hou Hsiao-hsien ripped a new tear in the fabric of time. With long sequence shots and wafts of opium, he plunges into late 19th century China, wending his way to the closed, secluded universe of houses where men competing in the intimate sphere of sentiments would escape from their marriages of convenience to capture the hearts of Shanghai’s most beautiful women. JB