Rating summary

Movie		3.5
Video		3.5
Audio		4.0
Extras		3.0
Overall		3.5

Flowers of Shanghai Blu-ray Movie Review

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman September 26, 2021

There's an old aphorism that certain activities can be "as exciting as watching paint dry", and some watching this elegant if awfully slow film from Hou Hsiao-Hsien may feel the phrase should be modified to be "as exciting as watching flowers bloom". The "flowers" in this case are actually "working girls" in brothels, which according to Chinese vernacular are called "flower houses". There's some really interesting information available online about the source novel which inspired this film, an 1892 opus by Han Bangqing which has been published under a number of evocative and maybe even charming titles, including The Sing-Song Girls of Shanghai. One of the fascinating trivia data points (and one which is also overtly mentioned by Tony Rayns in his introduction to the film included on this disc as a bonus feature as well), at least for those interested in language and/or dialect, is that Bangqing was evidently a proponent of so-called Wu Chinese, which is largely unintelligible to Mandarin speakers. In that regard, it's kind of interesting to note that the back cover of this release describes the spoken language(s) as "Shanghainese and Cantonese", which I think is the first such aggregation of languages that I've seen cross my review queue. What ever the "linguistic" aspects of Flowers of Shanghai might be, the film is probably going to be somewhat of a slog for some viewers, but it still provides a compelling peek at a 19th century China and some of its traditions which may strike contemporary eyes and sensibilities as "problematic".

Some might reasonably assume that a film that refers to courtesans as "flowers" might choose to offer characters with floral names, but instead many of the women in this film bear a somewhat odd aggregation of monikers that include both colors and various gemstones. The film focuses on a quartet of brothels, with various central characters either working at or visiting the various establishments. While there is a Jasmin (Vicky Wei) and a Golden Flower (Annie Yi), and while Flowers of Shanghai is undeniably an "ensemble piece" that may strike some as vignette driven, whatever through line there is probably belongs to Crimson (Michiko Hada), who has been involved with Master Wang (Tony Leung) for years. And in fact one of the kind of interesting aspects that Flowers of Shanghai presents is that the "working women" of the brothels were frequently in more or less monogamous relationships with the men who frequented the establishments, and that some of the men were actively involved in trying to "purchase" freedom for the women, who were basically indentured servants, often with debts that needed paying in order to secure their release.

There's a kind of quasi-ménage à trois at play with regard to Wang, Crimson and Jasmin, with a longstanding relationship between Wang and Crimson giving way to one between Wang and the younger Jasmin, though perhaps not for reasons that might be presumed from this brief description. A somewhat soap operatic set of interlocking plots offers slowly revealed background information that again puts the relationships between these three characters into a new light. In the meantime, several other courtesans' stories fill the margins of the tale, and include the repeated emphasis on the fact that the brothel women are basically prisoners, albeit ones kept in relative luxury. But several of the stories here involve the women attempting to forge (relatively?) independent lives for themselves, at least with regard to having to work in a brothel. There's therefore a somewhat stifling, at times positively claustrophobic, emotional ambience to a lot of Flowers of Shanghai that is probably only further emphasized by a pace that might be charitably described as being glacial.

Flowers of Shanghai Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Flowers of Shanghai is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of The Criterion Collection with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 1.85:1. Criterion's insert booklet contains the following information on the transfer:

Flowers of Shanghai is presented in its original aspect ratio of 1.85:1. This new 4K digital restoration was undertaken at L'Immagine Ritrovata in Bologna, Italy, from a 35 mm negative by Shochiku, in collaboration with the Shanghai International Film Festival and with funding provided by Jaeger-LeCoultre. The new 5.1 surround soundtrack was created by sound designer Tu Duu-chih from digital audio master files.

Kind of interestingly in terms of my memories of having seen this theatrically decades ago and then later on DVD and now this version, there's a subsequent credit which states:

Color grading consultant: Mark Lee Ping-bing

I try not to rely on an increasingly faulty memory of having viewed a film theatrically let alone on DVD, but the grading of this version struck me immediately as "different", if not necessarily "wrong", in terms of what I remember having seen so long ago, but I am the sort of person who tends to rely on the wishes of a director and/or (in this particular case) director of photography in terms of assessing color timing rather than my memories. That said, as can be gleaned from many of the screenshots, there's a recurrent tendency toward a mixture of oranges and greens throughout this presentation that can give things a kind of almost chartreuse suffusion a lot of the time. That, when combined with the glut of relatively dimly lit interior scenes, can lead to some loss of fine detail in darker tones especially. Because of the grading choices in combination with lighting regimens, there's a slightly "alien" look to the palette which can give an almost ghoulishly green aspect to things like flesh tones. While there is grain which can be spotted crawling up lighter portions of backgrounds or even rolling across lighter portions in the foreground of the frame, the appearance here is soft and filtered looking at times. There's also a kind of curious tendency to walk right up to the edge of posterizing, especially with regard to some of the orange tones, perhaps due to a "combo platter" of some of these aforementioned anomalies. You can notice it especially when lighting can change slightly and heads move, or even when some of the females wearing what I assume were silk or satin reflective material, and there can be brief passing "blotches" that accompany movement and/or lighting variances. All of this said, this still offers rather nice suffusion and a general improvement in detail levels over the now long ago DVD. In looking at our forum threads for various previous Blu-ray releases and some issues members encountered with those, I was especially watching for issues like banding and macroblocking, and I noticed nothing in those categories. My score is 3.75.

Flowers of Shanghai Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Flowers of Shanghai features a DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 track that is described (as mentioned above in the main body of the review) as being in "Shanghainese and Cantonese" on the back cover of this release. Despite taking place almost exclusively in rather small, confined spaces, there's an appealing spread to much of this surround track. The sonorous score by Yoshihiro Hanno is often very nicely spread through the side and rear channels, and there is good directionality in some of the scenes that feature a lot of characters in the frame simultaneously. Dialogue is rendered cleanly and clearly throughout, and I noticed no issues whatsoever with regard to damage, dropouts or distortion. Optional English subtitles are available.

Flowers of Shanghai Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Tony Rayns (HD; 28:26) is an interesting introduction to the film by Rayns produced by Criterion in 2021. He offers quite a bit of background information, not just on the film itself, but also Hou Hasio-Hsien in general as well as the source novel and its unusual use of the Wu dialect.


• Hou Hsiao-Hsien (HD; 13:16) is a 2015 interview with the director conducted in Los Angeles as part of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Science's Visual History Program Collection. I'm frankly not sure whether Hsiao-Hsien is speaking Mandarin or Cantonese, but this features English subtitles.


• Beautified Realism (HD; 37:06) is another 2021 production from Criterion, this time a well done documentary by Daniel Raim and Eugene Suen focusing on the film's production. This includes a lot of behind the scenes footage (some sourced from some pretty ragged looking archival video) along with some good interviews. This features English subtitles.


• Trailer (HD; 1:38)

Criterion's insert booklet is even more expansive than usual, with cast and crew credits, an essay by Jean Ma and an interview with Hou Hsiao-Hsien.

Flowers of Shanghai Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Flowers of Shanghai is gorgeous and stately, but it often comes off as a series of tableaux rather than as a compelling portrait of real human beings. The film's deliberately paced strategy may drive ADHD types a little batty (battier?), but in a way it helps to reinforce the strictures the women in this film experience. There are some passing oddities with the video that may distress some fans, but I found none of them to be a real deal breaker. Audio is fine, and the supplements are very interesting, per Criterion's standard operating procedure. Recommended.