Flowers of Shanghai (Hai shang hua) (1998)
Movie Info
Cast
as Wang Lingsheng
as Crimson
as Azhu
as Emerald
as Jade
as Hong
as Pearl
as Jasmin
as Golden Flower
as Luo
as Tao
as Huang
as Jade
as Treasure
as Zhu Shuren
as Tang
Critic Reviews for Flowers of Shanghai (Hai shang hua)
All Critics (10) | Top Critics (2) | Fresh (9) | Rotten (1) | DVD (1)
The film opens with a brilliant seven-minute take; the languid yet precise cinematography throughout gives it the seductive power of a drug-induced dream.
It's beautiful to look at, but you must have patience to enjoy it.
Flowers of Shanghai is a beautiful, tantalizingly oblique, and thoroughly hypnotic film, a work so sensual that one can nearly smell the perfume wafting from the screen.
Sympathetically depicts ... consuming, love-sick ennui.
Each scene of Flowers is like an exquisite and decorous mural, worth studying.
It probably isn't Hou's best film, but perhaps it is his prettiest.
Audience Reviews for Flowers of Shanghai (Hai shang hua)
A gorgeous-looking film with a beautiful art direction and a camera that appears to glide through the sumptuous spaces and rooms of those four brothels in 38 stunning long takes, making it feel almost like a travel in time to the atmospheric Shanghai of the end of the 19th century.
Super Reviewer
Multiple viewings in a theater setting MIGHT get this more stars. ... could also induce suicide.
Super Reviewer
moving very slowly from one blackout scene to the next, beautifully shot in the candlelit rooms of various brothels of the 19th century, flowers of shanghai explores the intrigues of 'flower girls' or courtesans, sold as children into a life little better than slavery. there's alot of drinking, gambling and opium smoking and the film requires a good deal of patience. i probably need to watch it again as i felt as though i had smoked opium myself afterward
Super Reviewer
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