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Flowers of Shanghai Director: Hsiao-hsien Hou Number of Items: 1 Format: Color, Widescreen Audience Rating: Unrated Running Time: 113 minutes Studio: Fox Lorber Product Group: DVD Release Date: 2002-04-16 Buy from Amazon

From Amazon.com With Flowers of Shanghai, Taiwanese director Hou Hsiao-Hsien delivers the opulent world of late-19th-century Chinese courtesans and their suitors miraculously intact. Hou's films are perhaps the most beguiling yet restrained in all of contemporary cinema, and this is no exception. Told as a series of panel-like portraits, the camera discreetly withdraws from raucous dinner parties and drinking games into the muted, jewel-like chambers of various flower girls. The need to procure patrons and eventual husbands from among their visitors lends an increasing air of anxiety to the games of seduction and betrayal played out within. As the young Master Wang (Tony Leung) soon learns, there is scarcely room for love inside this precarious world of decorum, addiction, and greed. Hou's canny ability to place characters so convincingly within a context is the work of a master filmmaker--nothing is ever assumed or contrived. From the stunning opening dinner scene to the resigned finale, Flowers is a seamless vision. --Fionn Meade

Customer Reviews: Total numer of reviews: 25 Average rating: 3.0 "Mesmerizing, Claustrophobic And A Bit Sad" This is a gorgeous, claustrophobic and mesmerizing movie about the flower girls -- the prostitutes -- who live and work in four elegant brothels -- the flower houses -- in Shanghai during the late 19th century. The film is set entirely in these houses. There is no natural light, everything is lit by dim lamps and candles. The world is made of dark, carved wood, silks and polished lacquer. There are no cuts, just slow dissolves to black and then into another scene, and the scene can be a continuation of a sequence separated only by minutes, or a move to a different flower girl in a another of the brothels. The effect is almost dream-like. Flower girls are purchased by the "aunties," the women who run the brothels, when they are 7 or 8. The aunties raise them, feed them, clothe them and train them in the profession of pleasing wealthy men. None have much of a future unless they can fascinate a customer enough to begin a long-term relationship ending in marriage as a second or third wife. There is Crimson who is supporting her family, and who finds herself unable to keep her relationship with Master Wang (Tony Leung Chiu Wai). There is Jasmine, who manages to marry Wang, and then is foolish enough to enter into an affair. There is Emerald, who is ambitious and knows her worth, who is determined to buy her freedom. There is Jade, increasingly popular and who thinks a young customer's statement of love is true. And there are the men, who spend hours dining and playing drinking games in the houses, attended by the women who pour their wine, laugh with them, prepare their opium pipes and entertain them privately by appointments made with the aunties. By the end of the movie we also realize that while we hear less of Jasmine, Crystal, Pearl and the other women we met or heard about earlier, we now are hearing more about Jade, Treasure, Golden Flower, Laurel, Silver Phoenix, newer flowers of Shanghai. Yet the men remain the same, only a bit older. I want to emphasize that this is no soap opera. Everything has a value, everything can be bargained for, but subtly. I think this movie is a fascinating look at a different time and style of life. You have to stay with it, though. It's one of those films where at first you may not be sure much is happening. A good deal does, but you have to be open to it. The DVD picture looks great, rich and dark; the subtitles are black-edged yellow and easy to read quickly. The only extra of significance is a filmography. "Lovely Film" This is a beautiful film with rich characters, beautiful sets and costumes and exquisite cinematography. Warning, though, its a film that focuses on exploration of character by showing vignettes from the lives of chinese prostitutes living in Shanghai in the late 19th century. There is very little "plot" so if you're looking for fast paced excitement you might not like it. "Just not interesting enough to keep me awake" The 1998 Chinese film is set in a 1880s brothel. The "flowers" are the young women who have been raised since childhood for their profession. Competition for the gentlemen goes on all the time as each woman hopes to become a "second wife" to a rich man. The men also wonder if the love these women profess is real. Like many Chinese movies, the pacing is slow and stylized. Sometimes I can enjoy a film like this but this particular story was just not interesting enough to keep me awake, the cinematography used too many shadows and the acting never engaged me. After about an hour, I shut it off and couldn't bear to go back to it the next day. You won't miss anything if you skip this one. Not recommended. "Please save your money" Well, to put it in the most polite terms I can think of, this film is on my all time 10 worst films list. I think this film definitely has the potential to top that list. I am a native speaker Chinese speaker. Plus, I am a native speaker of the Shanghai dialect, the same dialect the actors/actresses in this movie are supposed speak. Well let me tell you from a language standpoint, I had absolutely no idea what those actors/actresses are saying. No clue whatsoever. It was so painful to hear those actors butcher the Shanghai dialect so badly that I couldn't keep myself from burstting out laughing throughout the movie. It was THAT BAD!? For crying out loud, if the actors couldn't speak the Shanghai dialect, at least use do some dubbing and use some voice actors that can actually speak the Shanghai dialect. The lead male actor in the movie butchered his Shanghai dialect so badly in the beginning of the movie, that he ended up switching to his native Cantonese dialect for the remainder of the movie. God this is embarrasing. For a native speaker of Chinese, and a native speaker of the Shanghai dialect, I had to read subtitles in order to understand what's going on in this movie. On top of this, I had to read the subtitles in ENGLISH! Yes that's right, this DVD doesn't even include a Chinese subtitle! I basically ended up fast forwarding through this movie. The director really should have done some serious work in the cutting room. This movie have the potential to be a good 10 minute short film. But at an hour and half in length, this movie is one of the WORST I have ever seen. "boring" this was so boring, the lighting by candlelight added nothing to the movie. I found it all somewhat confusing, I love Chinese films but this one really fails. It was hard to follow just what was happening at any time in the film.