Flowers of Shanghai (1998) (2025)

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1998

海上花

Directed by Hou Hsiao-hsien

Synopsis

At the end of the 19th century, Shanghai is divided into several foreign concessions. In the British concession, a number of luxurious “flower houses” are reserved for the male elite of the city. Since Chinese dignitaries are not allowed to frequent brothels, these establishments are the only ones that these men can visit. They form a self-contained world, with its own rites, traditions and even its own language. The men don’t only visit the houses to frequent the courtesans but also to dine, smoke opium, play mahjong and relax. The women working there are known as the “flowers of Shanghai”.

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  • Cast
  • Crew
  • Details
  • Genres
  • Releases

Cast

Tony Leung Chiu-Wai Michiko Hada Carina Lau Kar-Ling Michelle Reis Jack Kao Rebecca Pan Stephanie Fong Shuan Annie Shizuka Inoh Vicky Wei Firebird Liu Hsu Hui-Ni Shuan Fang Hsiao-Hui Wei Hsu Ming Josephine A. Blankstein Simon Chang Tony Chang Yiu-Ming Lee Yu-han Lin Wei-kuo Chiang Yu-Hang Lee Tsai-erh Luo Moon Wang Xie Yan

DirectorDirector

Hou Hsiao-hsien

ProducersProducers

Yang Teng-Kuei Shozo Ichiyama

WriterWriter

Chu Tien-wen

Original WritersOriginal Writers

Bangqing Han Eileen Chang

EditorEditor

Liao Ching-Sung

CinematographyCinematography

Mark Lee Ping-Bing

Executive ProducerExec. Producer

Hou Hsiao-hsien

Production DesignProduction Design

Huang Wen-Ying

Art DirectionArt Direction

Huang Wen-Ying Chih-Wei Tsao

ComposersComposers

Yoshihiro Hanno Tu Duu-Chih

MakeupMakeup

Liao Shu-Chen

Studios

3-H Films Shochiku

Countries

Taiwan Japan

Primary Language

Chinese

Spoken Languages

Cantonese Chinese

Alternative Titles

Hai shang hua, 해상화, フラワーズ・オブ・シャンハイ, Les Fleurs de Shanghai, Die Blumen von Schanghai, The Flowers of Shanghai, Şangay'ın Çiçekleri, Hai Shang Hua, Hải Thượng Hoa, Шанхайские цветы, Flores de Shanghai, Die Blumen von Shanghai, შანხაის ყვავილები, Flores de Xangai, ฟลาวเวอร์สออฟเซี่ยงไฮ้

Genre

Drama

Themes

Moving relationship stories Tragic sadness and captivating beauty Show All…

Releases by Date

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Theatrical

01 Oct 1998
  • Flowers of Shanghai (1998) (3)Taiwan

05 Oct 1998
  • Flowers of Shanghai (1998) (4)USANR

Releases by Country

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Flowers of Shanghai (1998) (5)Taiwan
01 Oct 1998
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Flowers of Shanghai (1998) (6)USA
05 Oct 1998
  • TheatricalNR

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  • Review by Darren Carver-Balsiger ★★★★½ 10

    Flowers of Shanghai is an almost perfect cinematic experience, a film of such incredible calm yet it rages like a storm within your heart. It is a film with no beginning or end, just a loose collection of scenes that invoke and create an entire world. It is a film of long takes, with a lengthy opening shot designed just to set the atmosphere. Throughout Flowers of Shanghai, the camera merely sits and observes, panning between players in this extraordinary landscape. Hou Hsiao-hsien's camera just keeps distance and never judges. His film never enters the outside world, we are just confined with the people of the past.

    Flowers of Shanghai is rich in the feel of history. It deals with…

  • Review by Will Sloan ★★★★★ 1

    Hou Hsiao-hsien looks at the screenwriting dictum "Show, don't tell" and spits in its face. So beautiful. So buttoned-up. So narcotized. So claustrophobic. I felt like I was going insane. When Tony Leung got drunk and trashed a room halfway through, I stood up and cheered. Finally - a display of emotion!!!!

    Seeing this a few years ago on a luminous 35mm print was preferable to seeing it at home with a lawnmower going across the street. Still: incredible movie. I don't begrudge Tony Leung for doing a Marvel movie, he's done enough for cinema.

  • Review by Christina ★★★★

    there is the male gaze and then there’s tony leung’s masterful, melancholic gaze!

    hou hsiao-hsien’s romantic relic to the final years of imperial china, flowers of shanghai captures gritty repression beyond the tinsel allure and elusive elegance of its opiate brothels. this film is a tale of wealthy patrons and their “flower girls”, a chinese term for courtesans. the girls, reduced to objects of pleasure and deprived of personal autonomy, have to solely rely on these men for survival.

    illuminated by hazy glims, and strengthened by amber tones, hou emits the intensity of physical and emotional confinement. the camera glides in episodic conversations like an adorned soap opera, limiting our scope to the beauty of a sheer frame. each character engrossed in a world of opulence and humanized by lust, jealousy and love. despite its delicate beguilement almost every room in the setting bears misfortune, subjecting audiences to the same elaborate claustrophobia of the “flower house”.

  • Review by Rafael "Parker!!" Jovine ★★★½ 4

    Action! - Hou Hsiao-Hsien: The Long and Minimalist View of Taiwan

    Hou translates a lot of his sensibilities and trademarks to this past era, exchanging much of the grit for the exquisite interiors in which the whole film takes place. The production design is minimalist yet somewhat detailed and ultimately evocative of bygone times, both simpler and yet so complex. A place where love and romance blossom and heartbreaks are equally inevitable. It's both sensual and yet there’s some bleak and depressive hiding undertones. The film heavily relies on dialogue, but many nuances are derived from the physical performances, a skill that Tony Leung excels at. I also loved the whole theatricality that pervades throughout the whole film, all without…

  • Review by Paul Elliott ★★★★ 5

    Flowers of Shanghai is a visually extraordinary Taiwanese film from Hou Hsiao-hsien that features detailed costumes and sets of the late nineteenth century. It looks at the lives of several women attending as courtesans in four Shanghai brothels (flower houses), and the narrative is split up into passages named after the women, each one sketching, by implication and cryptically, their personality and fate.

    The world outside of the flower houses is seldom glimpsed, and then only by the glow of sunset or sunrise peeping through a shuttered window helping to render the establishments into being little more than a claustrophobic gilded cage. The women frequently serve as long-term mistresses to prosperous men, with their long-term desire being that they will…

  • Review by Will Sloan ★★★★★

    Lights off, noise-cancelling headphones on, phone tucked away in the other room. Time for an overwhelming experience. After spending a week watching films by Taiwanese schlockmeister Chu Yen-ping, I felt a need deep within my very soul to re-centre myself.

  • Review by selcen ★★★ 10

    This movie doesn't tell us a story, it welcomes us into the story. It's as if we are guests of a flower house in Shanghai in the 19th century and we are calmly "witnessing" what is happening there. This is a beautiful experience. Because unless we have a time machine, we cannot have this kind of experience. However, the slow pace of the movie may affect your "witnessing" experience. It even made me think it was boring at times.
    This is the second movie I've watched from this director. He has visually outstanding movies. It's like looking at a painting or like watching neon city lights through the window of a speeding car. If I liked their stories more, they…

  • Review by Ayush ★★★★★ 6

    Late 19th-century Shanghai. Gorgeous brothels, elegant courtesans, and wealthy men of varying characters. The exquisite interior is bathed in the colour gold, perhaps fittingly so, since this world is driven by materialism. As the camera pans across the many rooms and fades to black, it seems as if we have unwittingly been made spectators in their affairs.

    The trappings of love which often creep up unannounced and the inevitable heartbreak that follows doesn't discriminate between the courtesans and the patrons. The outside world ceases to exist in the momentary bliss of grand banquets, opium smoke, and sex. But sex is never explicitly shown. For a film where the camera exclusively lurks in the intimate shadows of the flower houses, there…

  • Review by comrade_yui ★★★★★ 7

    one of the marvelous ways that cinematic time functions is through ellipsis -- the cut between two shots or scenes creates inherent absence in the same way that the separation between two lines of poetry does -- the negative space of reality is given significance, one's attention is drawn to these gaps, our imagination filling in said space with speculation and patterns based on what is shown to us, and hou hsiao-hsien's entire filmography is based upon this careful deployment of ellipsis, the non-visualized part of the visual medium, the dark screen that the images are projected onto which we are usually not meant to see,

    this is the cinema of ozu and tarkovsky, but executed with an eye towards…

  • Review by Willow Maclay ★★★★

    A movie of very deliberate controlled tone and lighting. The camera is in constant movement, but hardly ever out of medium shots. Hou employs a gliding technique to match the ever present opium dens and feelings of immobility to both reference the drug and the languid nature of the courtesans. The job is just a job, and like in Lizzie Borden's Working Girls the blank spaces are leeched upon in the life of sex work instead of what cinema has come to falsely understand as the life of a sex worker. It's a boring gig. I don't know if Hou was going for realism, but I imagine this is close considering the time period, and the job. Like most movies…

  • Review by ilsu 3

    It's a movie that requires serious patience to finish. I was going to stop the movie halfway through, but I decided to continue after seeing the comments, but there was no change in my mind. I think some movies should remain based on the books they are adapted from. We have a section from a 19th century brothel. It provides a window into issues such as the reasons why the women working in the brothel work here, how they got involved in this business, what the customers think about them, how the women try to get along with the customers who come to save themselves from this house, and the intrigues they use to steal customers from each other. The…

  • Review by Filipe Furtado ★★★★½ 1

    The images are as seductive as the setting is oppressive, and Hou crafts the movie around this duality. The three dozen or so shots are as careful choreographed as the social tapestry around Leung and the Shanghai brothels. The movie is stuffed with detail, it is the high point of Hou’s more literary inclinations, while constant feeling like it is overtaken by its wasteful atmosphere. Si much emotion laid bare, it takes a while to really grasp what the movie is quite doing. I think it took me a few years to get around to seeing this one, by the time it already had the reputation as Hou’s masterpiece and as often happens, that probably does not help the movie so much makes it seem harder to access than the actual experience is.

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