Hou Hsiao-hsien gem Flowers of Shanghai explores complex relationships between wealthy patrons and courtesans
FLOWERS OF SHANGHAI (HAI SHANG HUA) (Hou Hsiao-hsien, 1998)
Walter Reade Theater
165 West 65th St. between Broadway & Amsterdam Aves.
July 2-20, $15
www.filmlinc.org
Taiwanese New Wave master Hou Hsiao-hsien might be the best filmmaker whose work you’ve never seen. For more than thirty-five years, he has been telling intimate, meditative stories about life, family, and relationships with a gentle, deeply intuitive style, infused with gorgeous visuals and subtly beautiful soundtracks. Film at Lincoln Center’s wide-ranging “Big Screen Summer: NYFF58 Redux” continues with one of the New York Film Festival staple’s most elegant tales, Flowers of Shanghai. The 1998 film, being shown in a dramatic 4K restoration, is set in brothels, known as flower houses, in 1884 in the British Concession, where men and women congregate for social interaction and develop long-term bonds and responsibilities to one another based on much more than just sex. The men play drinking games, smoke opium, and buy the women gifts. The story, told in a series of vignettes as Mark Lee Ping Bin’s camera slowly moves through dark, lush, reddish gas-lit interiors, focuses on Master Wang (Tony Leung Chiu-wai), who has promised to be the sole patron of Crimson (Michiko Hada) but who has also been secretly seeing the younger Jasmin (Vicky Wei) and lavishing her with presents. The elder Master Hong (Luo Tsai-erh) and Auntie Huang (Rebecca Pan), the madam, discuss the situation, bringing up issues of responsibility and honesty, attempting to come to some kind of understanding in an exchange that shows respect for both the men and women who are a far cry from the Western conception of johns and prostitutes.
Most scenes end by fading quietly to black, then introducing the woman protagonist of the next section — Crimson, Jasmin, Pearl (Carina Lau), Jade (Shuan Fang), and Emerald (Michelle Reis) — as the women gossip and Crimson and Hong, and other pairs, try to figure out what they want out of life and from one another. In Flowers of Shanghai, Hou explores class differences, gender roles, the Asian notion of saving face, and intimacy with grace and sophistication. When the film fades out for the final time, viewers are left knowing they’ve just experienced something special, a stunning work that uses the technologies of cinema to delve into the very nature of humanity.
“Big Screen Summer: NYFF58 Redux” runs through August 26 with such other 2020 film festival favorites as Joyce Chopra’s Smooth Talk, Eugène Green’s Atarrabi and Mikelats, John Gianvito’s Her Socialist Smile, William Klein’s Muhammad Ali, the Greatest, Nuria Giménez’s My Mexican Bretzel, Philippe Lacôte’s Night of the Kings, and Orson Welles’s Hopper/Welles, an epic conversation between Welles and Dennis Hopper.
Wong Kar-wai’s second film, Days of Being Wild — following the surprising success of his debut feature, As Tears Go By — was a popular failure, as Hong Kong audiences were not yet ready for his introspective, character-driven, nonlinear style. (However, it did win five Hong Kong Film Awards, including Best Picture and Best Actor.) Days is Wong’s first film with master cinematographer Christopher Doyle, who shot all of Wong’s work through 2004, including Chungking Express, Fallen Angels, Happy Together, and In the Mood for Love. The late Leslie Cheung, who jumped out a hotel window in 2003, stars as Yuddy, a disaffected, beautiful youth who lures in women and then, after they fall in love with him, verbally mistreats them and cheats on them. Among his conquests are the gorgeous Su-Lizhen (Maggie Cheung), often shot in magnificent close-up, and the trampy Mimi (Carina Lau), who is jealous of Su, who takes comfort in telling her tale of woe to local police officer Tide (Andy Lau). Meanwhile, Yuddy, who was raised by a former prostitute, is obsessed with finding his birth mother. Set in 1960, the film’s leitmotif involves time and memory, with clocks ticking loudly and lots of long, lingering looks. The story goes a bit haywire in the latter sections, although the ending is a gem. (Look for Tony Leung there.)
With their divorce pending, writer-director Olivier Assayas and Hong Kong superstar Maggie Cheung wish each other a fond farewell in the moving drama Clean. Named Best Actress at the 2004 Cannes Film Festival for her extraordinary performance, Cheung stars as Emily Wang, a junkie trying to resuscitate the fading music career of her heroin-addicted lover, Lee (British musician James Johnston). Their life together is so screwed up that they rarely see their son, Jay (James Dennis), who lives in Vancouver with Lee’s parents (Nick Nolte and Martha Henry). On the road, Emily scores some drugs, fights with Lee, goes out for a ride, then returns to find him dead from an overdose and the cops waiting to arrest her. After six months in prison, she gets out to find that her life has changed more than she could ever have imagined. Cheung is effervescent every step of the way, lighting up the screen despite playing a very hard-to-like character; her tender scenes with the soft-spoken, grizzled Nolte are particularly gentle and touching. Unfortunately the subplot set in the music world is clichéd, annoying, and mostly unnecessary, everything that the rest of the film is not. The stunt casting is particularly irritating: Tricky, the band Metric, and Mazzy Star’s David Roback all play themselves. The otherwise fine cast also includes Béatrice Dalle, Jeanne Balibar, Don McKellar, and Laetitia Spigarelli, with a soundtrack dominated by ethereal songs by Brian Eno.
Olivier Assayas pays homage to François Truffaut’s Day for Night in this piece of pseudoartistic fluff about a film crew’s attempts at remaking Louis Feuillade’s 1915 classic Les Vampires. The great Maggie Cheung, who later married and divorced Assayas, is wasted as the star of the remake, and Truffaut regular Jean-Pierre Léaud, playing the director, is frustratingly unintelligible when he speaks in English, which unfortunately is a lot in this high-falutin’ mess.
Back in 1993, writer-director Wong Kar-wai’s Ashes of Time was released, a thinking man’s martial arts epic inspired by Jin Yong’s The Eagle-Shooting Heroes novels. With numerous versions in circulation and the original negatives in disrepair, Wong (Chungking Express, In the Mood for Love) decided to painstakingly reedit and restore the film fifteen years later, renaming it Ashes of Time Redux. The plot – which is still as confusing as ever — revolves around Ouyang Feng (Leslie Cheung), a loner who lives in the desert, where people come to him when they need someone taken care of. Every year he is visited by Huang Yaoshi (Tony Leung Ka-fai), who keeps him informed of the world outside jianghu — especially about his lost love (Maggie Cheung). Meanwhile, Murong Yang (Brigitte Lin) has demanded that Ouyang kill Huang for having jilted his sister, Murong Yin (also played by Lin), who in turn hires Ouyang to kill Yang. There’s also a blind swordsman (Tony Leung Chiu Wai), a peasant girl with a basket of eggs (Charlie Young), a poor, rogue swordsman (Jacky Cheung), and a bottle of magic wine that can erase memories. Or something like that. But what’s most impressive about Ashes of Time Redux is Christopher Doyle’s thrilling, swirling cinematography, which sweeps the audience into the film, and Wu Tong’s rearranged score, based on the original music by Frankie Chan and Roel A. Garcia and featuring soaring cello solos by Yo-Yo Ma.
Taiwanese New Wave master Hou Hisao-hsien might be the best filmmaker whose work you’ve never seen. For more than thirty years, he has been telling intimate, meditative stories about life, family, and relationships with a gentle, deeply intuitive style, infused with gorgeous visuals and subtly beautiful soundtracks. One of his most elegant works, Flowers of Shanghai, is set in brothels, known as flower houses, in 1884 in the British Concession, where men and women congregate for social interaction and develop long-term bonds and responsibilities to one another based on much more than just sex. The men play drinking games, smoke opium, and buy the women gifts. The story, told in a series of vignettes as Mark Lee Ping-Bing’s camera slowly moves through dark, lush, reddish gas-lit interiors, focuses on Master Wang (Tony Leung Chiu-wai), who has promised to be the sole patron of Crimson (Michiko Hada) but who has also been secretly seeing the younger Jasmin (Vicky Wei) and lavishing her with presents. The elder Master Hong (Luo Tsai-erh) and Auntie Huang (Rebecca Pan), the madam, discuss the situation, bringing up issues of responsibility and honesty, attempting to come to some kind of understanding in an exchange that shows respect for both the men and women who are a far cry from the Western conception of johns and prostitutes.
