Prostitution has been a popular trade in the movies. It could be about glamorous courtesans in chic apartments for the rich or miserable young women in dingy hotel rooms for the low wages of the poor, some kind of bordello or simply that most elliptical dishonour, the heroine with a dirty past. Sometimes the girls got married, sometimes they remained alone or died but they were usually entitled to a sublimated love scene with their lovers, if not their customers, and when morals changed they could be obliging enough to have sex with both lovers and customers.
Hou Hsiao-hsien makes this film as if it belonged in some old time that maybe never existed. Flowers of Shanghai is a film about glamorous brothel-bound prostitutes without a single sex scene but it shows or tells everything else, which provides it with a surreal intimacy.
That intimacy is reinforced by the fact that there are no exterior scenes and by the gripping warmth of its colour palette. That warmth invites you into the movie's visual environment to share in the cruel melancholy of the stories, the domestic routines through which they unfold and in some unexpected comic episodes: an attentive camera that pans and zooms attests to a regimented fate for the characters it watches, carefully staged vignettes shot in distant takes feel like vivid scenes spied on through a keyhole or behind a curtain and in some cases the dramatic expectations about the characters are ironically upended.
There's a great article on the movie in the external reviews section. The author is in awe of what he writes about. It lingers on Hou's camera movements and framing and gives a detailed account of what makes this movie intoxicating. But it's in Portuguese, so stop reading this and learn the language!
Hou Hsiao-hsien makes this film as if it belonged in some old time that maybe never existed. Flowers of Shanghai is a film about glamorous brothel-bound prostitutes without a single sex scene but it shows or tells everything else, which provides it with a surreal intimacy.
That intimacy is reinforced by the fact that there are no exterior scenes and by the gripping warmth of its colour palette. That warmth invites you into the movie's visual environment to share in the cruel melancholy of the stories, the domestic routines through which they unfold and in some unexpected comic episodes: an attentive camera that pans and zooms attests to a regimented fate for the characters it watches, carefully staged vignettes shot in distant takes feel like vivid scenes spied on through a keyhole or behind a curtain and in some cases the dramatic expectations about the characters are ironically upended.
There's a great article on the movie in the external reviews section. The author is in awe of what he writes about. It lingers on Hou's camera movements and framing and gives a detailed account of what makes this movie intoxicating. But it's in Portuguese, so stop reading this and learn the language!