Linbeymusol Wonderful character development!

Clarissa Mora The tone of this movie is interesting -- the stakes are both dramatic and high, but it's balanced with a lot of fun, tongue and cheek dialogue.

Brennan Camacho Mostly, the movie is committed to the value of a good time.

Abegail Noëlle While it is a pity that the story wasn't told with more visual finesse, this is trivial compared to our real-world problems. It takes a good movie to put that into perspective.

Robert First, a disclaimer: I love so-called "art films", from Cocteau and Eisenstein to David Lynch and Krystof Kieslowski. I have a long attention span and am willing to extend considerable effort towards appreciating any work of art.Having said that, The Flowers of Shanghai was largely a disappointment. Yes, the sets and costuming are sumptuous. True, the mood evoked by the film is seductive. And the subject matter--the relationships between courtesans and their clients--is at least provocative. But for a number of reasons, Hou fails to deliver a film that rises above those elements.The reasons are many. First, the plot is minimal--hardly compelling--mostly relying upon the petty machinations between the courtesans and the clients who try not to become too involved with them. But such a minimal plot can only engage if we become involved in the characters, and this is very difficult to do.That's problem number two: the characters simply aren't compelling. The men tend to be equivocal and emotionally distant. The women tend to be shallow and manipulative. Since there are essentially no close-up shots, and the physical expressions are very restrained, we have no sense of people's emotional states. There is not one character that we can really care about.Third: the editing is leisurely. Really leisurely. Glacial. Very few directors can pull off a five minute interior shot with almost no dialogue or action; Ozu was one. But Hou--although better than many contemporary directors--isn't up to Ozu's level by a long shot. Hou's scenes, unlike Ozu's, don't so much engender our contemplation as they engender tedium. A director has to be able to recognize when a scene has come to the end of its life; this he doesn't seem to be able to do.A note to the curious: every shot in this film is an interior shot; you never see the outdoors--not even the sky through the windows. And despite the subject matter and the warnings of adult content on the box, there are no sex scenes; there is no nudity. Structure-wise, the film depicts three activities: men playing "rock, paper, scissors" around a table, people having their little dramas in private, and people brooding.That's basically it.I would like to be able to say that The Flowers of Shanghai was more than just a 2-hours-plus visual curiosity, but it simply isn't. And more the shame because of its wasted potential.

Balthazar-5 I saw this film at Cannes where delegates, including would-be intelligent critics emerged from the film scratching their heads and mumbling 'interesting' - a sure sign that they couldn't understand a word of it. For me it had been an epiphanous experience.Six months later Cahiers du Cinema voted it the best film of its year...I am sure there is a word to describe the effect of the film, but I can't lay my hand on it, so I will say 'emotionally disjoint'. As the men sit around playing Mah Jong talking, generally of trivia, huge emotional dramas are going on, but obliquely, in relation to the girls in the brothel. The effect is crushing. I thought, while watching, mainly of Jean-Marie Straub as it has a minimalist side, but with such greater emotional power and resonance. It is so tragic that this magnificent film has had such a poor release in the west - no theatrical distribution at all in the UK...

mage121179 I was hopeful of this film, because I generally like period film dramas, and I thought an asian brothel might provide an interesting look at a new culture to me. However, the style and plot of this film made it unbearable to watch, and with each fade to black I prayed it wouldn't fade back in again.The costumes and sets were beautiful, but the audience is not allowed a good enough look at them. With poor lighting and absolutely no close-ups, we are left with a vague impression of what the location and people look like. Another problem with the lack of close-ups is the inability to see the emotions of the characters. We hear a lot of crying, but that's about it. I felt no empathy for the characters, because I couldn't even get a picture of what they looked like, much less how they were feeling. As for the pace of the movie, I don't think it goes anywhere. It has no plot, no driving force, and no interest in character or story. It's like someone just stuck a security camera in a brothel. How can you call that art or entertainment?

zoegene I have to view the movie twice, once by reading the subtitles, and the second time to enjoy the movie itself. When I was reading the subtitles, I found "Flowers of Shanghai" boring. When I focused on the film itself, it was actually a nice movie. I could feel the opium filled air, the emotions of the characters were buried under the smokes. Only a small number of Chinese-speaking audience would have no need to read the subtitles because the dialogs were spoken in a specific dialect.