Flowers of Shanghai

A Chinese film set in Shanghai. The year is the 1880s. There are luxury brothels in the British quarter. They are called flower houses. The women live there, receive clients, and are kept there by debt. The film never goes outside. Every scene is interior and the street is not seen once. From there the narrative runs several lines at once. Wang is an official. He has gone to the same woman for a long time and has now begun going to another house. Crimson learns of it. She is not angry; she is calculating, because the matter is money. In another house Emerald wants to buy herself out. The negotiation over the price runs for months. Jasmin is young and new. She has only just entered the system. The narrative proceeds scene by scene. Each begins with a fade and ends with a fade. The time in between is not shown. Who did what and when, the viewer works out from the talk. What the narrative is interested in is not love but contract: its idea is that every relationship in these houses is a matter of debt, property and payment, and that feeling is wedged inside it. The scenes are long single takes. The camera drifts slowly left and right and there is almost no cutting. The light is entirely oil lamp. The rooms are yellow, smoky and always in half-dark. The actors speak Shanghainese; some did not know the language and worked phonetically. The source is Han Bangqing's nineteenth-century novel, which Eileen Chang had translated into modern Chinese. The music is a few repeating figures. Tony Leung Chiu-wai, Michiko Hada, Carina Lau and Jack Kao are in the cast. Hou Hsiao-hsien directed. Who it is for: anyone who likes slow cinema and formal strictness. Who it is not for: anyone looking for incident; the narrative is almost entirely talk and telling the characters apart is hard at first.