Flowers of Shanghai Reviews

Based on an 1894 novel by Han Ziyun, director Hou Hsiao-hsien's period drama is intended to capture the plight of "flower girls," prostitutes in a 19th-century Shanghai brothel. The story has great potential, but this claustrophobic endeavor's static and tortured quality is stifling. The setting is a cluster of lavish bordellos called flower houses, located in the decadent, moribund China of the late colonial period. The entire film takes place around a brothel-parlor table laden with lavish dishes, inebriating drinks and smoldering opium pipes, where a group of rich patrons in expensive silk play a ceaseless round of drinking games surrounded by radiant and submissive concubines. The girls — demure characters with names like Jade (Shuan Fang), Crimson (Michiko Hada)and Jasmine (Vicky Wei) — get short shrift; each of their potentially engrossing stories is lost amidst cliched dilemmas and petty squabbles. In what passes for the film's dramatic spine, a long-time client and a cynical flower girl conspire to profit from covering up the scandal of a failed double suicide. A subplot touches lightly on a foolish young "flower" who makes the mistake of falling in love with a particularly useless client, but her tragic demise isn't given much weight. The camera never ventures outside, but remains fixed on the action at the table, gliding languidly past the same sepia-toned tableau: In the film's universe, people are indistinguishable and the setting never changes. Hou does succeed in one key respect: His films evokes opium addiction, a narcotic delirium fading into a dreamless sleep.