David Walsh review (World Socialist Web Site)

Hou Hsiao-hsien is one of Taiwan's leading filmmakers, and one of the world's. A number of critics and others have suggested that his new film, Flowers of Shanghai , is not up to his previous work. They may be right, but I'm not entirely convinced.

I admit it made me slightly nervous when I heard that Hou was making his first historical film. A general artistic problem is involved. An artist's first body of work is inevitably bound up with youthful anger, desire, dissatisfaction, fear. One pours out one's heart and soul with little regard for formal elegance. On the contrary, roughness, spontaneity, fragmentation are positive virtues at this stage. They often produce fresh and innovative work. But these moods and forms exhaust themselves. What then?

The desire to penetrate reality more deeply and the mastery of technique function more or less independently of one another. Often at the moment the artist achieves a certain level of technical mastery he or she is adopted by bourgeois public opinion and "canonized ... in their school textbooks," as Trotsky put it. Although it doesn't appear this way to the artist, of course, classicism (perhaps academicism) is often the aesthetic expression of the artist making peace with the world that has now begun to recognize and reward him or her.

A turn to historical works can manifest the same process, or, in our day, simply express the difficulties the artist faces in making sense of a very confusing present. On the other hand, it might reflect the genuine desire to understand the roots of the circumstances one currently confronts.

I don't know what conscious or unconscious mental processes went into Hou's decision to make Flowers of Shanghai , but my reading of the film suggests that it is a serious effort to come to terms with the present.

The film is based on a famous Chinese novel. It concerns the activities of a number of prostitutes and their clients in certain elegant Shanghai brothels in the late nineteenth century. At the center of the film lie the relations between Crimson, one of the courtesans, and her long-time client, Wang. He has recently lost interest in her and taken up with Jasmine. She fears abandonment, he is cold, she plays tricks, he turns angry ...

Other dramas are taking place. One courtesan, Emerald, buys her freedom from a brothel keeper. The contract governing the purchase, carefully and artistically drawn up, is witnessed by gangsters. A wealthy young man falls in love with a young girl, Jade, and proposes marriage. Such a union is out of the question. In the end he gives her 10,000 gen, five thousand for her freedom, 5,000 toward her marriage--to another man.

Hou's film is exquisite. It is impossible to do justice to it in words. His recreation of the conversations, drinking parties, conspiracies, and of the claustrophobic atmosphere in the brothels (the camera never leaves them) has something of genius in it. (One of the more disgraceful facts about the film industry in our day is that not a single film by Hou Hsiao-hsien, considered one of the leading filmmakers in the world for more than a decade, has been distributed commercially in North America. Has there ever been a comparable exclusion?)

The world represented in Flowers of Shanghai is horrifying: Byzantine, corrupt, lying. The women are bought and sold. Oppressed, they respond with emotional terrorism. They're monsters, by and large, themselves. None of them questions the existing set-up. And nothing here is called by its rightful name. Clients are "callers," appointments for sex "bookings." Money never changes hands in public. The women have beautiful names, but one wrong move will end them up on the street, without a penny. The rooms are magnificently furnished; everyone is polite and respectful. Out of sight there are beatings, deaths from starvation and disease. I don't know Hou's motive for making this film, but I would assume it has something to with the situation in present-day China. At any rate, it should.