Flowers of Shanghai

Directed by Hou Hsiao-Hsien, Taiwan, 1998

A brief opening title sets the scene: late 19th century Shanghai's opulent Flower Houses, brothels attended by the wealthy. The film fades in on a group of men gossiping and playing rowdy drinking games. Silent, serene women stand around them, occasionally whispering among themselves or strategically contributing to the men's conversation. The camera drifts around the outskirts of the group, capturing the conversation's flow without emphasizing one particular person. It's a naturalistic scene that feels unscripted and unrehearsed - like the camera is a portal into an everyday moment in the past. The shot lasts nearly ten minutes uninterrupted.

It takes an unusually gifted director and cast to make a lengthy, un-showy sequence like that engaging, but Flowers of Shanghai immediately immersed me into its world. Each scene plays out in a similar way - the film fades out of one shot and into another, each a tableaux of life in Shanghai's flower houses that never feel enacted for the sake of an audience, but like discreet glimpses into past lives. This approach to historical recreation is not dramatically satisfying in the conventional sense. Flowers of Shanghai loosely follows several major characters, but they come and go, and major events often occur off-screen. Melodrama of any kind is elided, and despite taking place in a brothel no sex is shown. Like in real life, conversations are rambling and unrushed, and people often do not say what they really mean.

Flowers of Shanghai is more anthropological than dramatic. Through observation we slowly learn how this cloistered world operates. Each flower house is run by a madame who buys girls as young as 7 or 8. She trains them to become specialized courtesans called flower girls once they are teenagers. Flower girls are visited by wealthy patrons, who form relationships (or contracts) that are often semi-monogamous. The patrons support the girls, buying them clothes and jewelry, and the girls provide companionship, a sentimental education, and sex. The luckiest (and smartest) flower girls are bought, at an exorbitant price, out of the houses and into marriage - usually as a second or third wife, as no upper-class gentleman would take a courtesan as his first.

As in all his films, director Hou Hsiao-Hsien studies how individuals are shaped by, and survive within, their environments. We observe that the women who flourish as flower girls are practical businessmen, who know when to be charming and when to be cruel. The women who are incapable of adapting are beaten down ruthlessly. The men are careless and harsh, often without intending to be. Their hierarchal power is so ingrained and unquestioned that they aren't even aware of their cruelty. In this environment, falling in love is dangerous and short-lived, though it still happens. The glimpses of unselfconscious emotion in Flowers of Shanghai - whether tenderness or anger - are startling for their precious authenticity in a society ruled by money, status, and inequality.

Flowers of Shanghai is beautiful and suffocating. Every scene takes place indoors, with cinematography lit only by the light of oil lamps. Everything is lushly beautiful, from the flower girls' dresses to the ornate decor and lavish meals; but it's also overwhelming, a world smothered in things. The slow drift of the camera, droning strings score, and slow fades between scenes gives Flowers of Shanghai a soothing, hypnotic quality, like being lulled into an opium dream (that could just be a secondhand high from all the opium smoked in the movie).

Hou Hsiao-Hsien is unique in his vision as an artist. His films are both practical and poetic, as they rarely escape mundane realities but nevertheless become dreamy, mysterious experiences. Flowers of Shanghai is among his finest films - not as endearing as Cafe Lumiere or as awe-inspiring as The Assassin, but a powerful, vivid recreation of a long-gone world.

Viewing Journal - January 2017

Two 2016 releases I've caught up with this week...

The BFG (Steven Spielberg, United States) - Like a stowaway from a more innocent era of children's films. Spielberg's latest has none of the frantic pacing, anachronistic brattiness or vulgar humor of your average kid-pic drivel. OK, there are a surprising number of fart jokes, but even those are painless; they're not a desperate grab for cheap laughs but actual jokes, with patient set-ups and silly punchlines. That patience is key to The BFG's charm. It doesn't rush through the spectacle, but soaks in the wonder of its young heroine catching dreams like multi-colored fireflies, or the absurdity of the titular gentle giant visiting Buckingham Palace and making its human-sized grandeur look like a dollhouse. The main attraction is the Big Friendly Giant himself. All-CGI characters usually leave me cold but he's an engaging exception, since very little of Mark Rylance's winsome charm has been lost in translation. The BFG may not be distinctive enough to become a new kids' movie classic, nor is it among Steven Spielberg's finest. But it is modest, lovely, and child-like, virtues that shouldn't be underestimated. Had it come out in the 90s, little-kid me would've loved it.

American Honey (Andrea Arnold, United States) - Not only is American Honey a road trip movie, watching it was like experiencing a road trip. Moments of spontaneous beauty flit by, but it's dreadfully long and I was relieved when it ended. No doubt, American Honey's lengthy aimlessness is intentional, as it reflects these kids' lives - they're going nowhere. Star, a bright teen with a wild streak, escapes her miserable home life to join a hard-partying crew of vagabonds, traveling across America in a van and selling magazine subscriptions. They're America's abandoned kids, the so-called "white trash" from neighborhoods devastated by meth and poverty, banding together and looking for freedom on the road. Director Andrea Arnold captures natural moments of camaraderie among the crew, from sing-alongs to drunken fights, and coaxes believable performances from a cast of nonprofessional actors. Even Shia LaBeouf, the only established Hollywood actor in the crew, blends in. Arnold has a good eye for the gorgeous expanses and grim detritus of middle America, and a good ear for music. The rap / country soundtrack fits the milieu and works in unison with the visuals. American Honey has the stuff to make a great movie but, frustratingly, it isn't one. Despite being 160 minutes long, it does not expand in meaning as it goes along. The characters remain half-sketched. The social commentary - the teens a microcosm of capitalism at its starkest, their American Dream not stretching beyond "make money, get turnt" - offers little insight. As an experiential, sensual immersion into a certain lifestyle, American Honey is occasionally exhilarating, but too monotonous to maintain interest over nearly three hours.

Silence

Directed by Martin Scorsese, United States, 2016

The 1966 novel Silence, written by Shusaku Endo, is set in 17th century feudal Japan. After the Shimabara Rebellion, a thousands-strong uprising of mostly Catholic peasants against the ruling Tokugawa shogunate, the Emperor outlawed all Christianity from the country. Remaining Kakure Kirishitan ("Hidden Christians") were discovered by Japanese authorities by forcing them to step on the fumie, plaques with carved images of Christ and Mary. Those who refused were tortured or killed. In Endo's novel, two Portuguese Jesuits sneak into the country despite the danger, to spread their gospel and to track down their old mentor, Padre Ferreira, who is rumored to have apostatized under torture. Shusaku Endo had a unique perspective on his novel's subject matter. He was a Japanese Roman Catholic, a religious minority in his home country who experienced persecution for his beliefs, particularly during the imperial years of his youth. When studying abroad in France in the 1950s, he experienced racial hatred and the lack of understanding between West and East. His experiences must have granted him a rare, empathetic perspective on this time and place in history, as his Silence illuminates the sincere faith of the Jesuit priests while exposing their destructive colonial hubris.

Silence had been adapted onto film once before, in 1971 by filmmaker Masahiro Shinoda, but Endo reportedly disliked it, believing it misrepresented his story. Of course I would have no way of actually knowing, but I suspect he would approve of Martin Scorsese's new adaptation. Martin Scorsese has desired to adapt the book for decades, and his passion for the material shows clearly in the finished film. Even more importantly, he understands the book's multitudinous meanings, and has translated them from prose to cinema with powerful emotional and intellectual clarity.

Scorsese also wrote a foreword to a recent reprinting of Silence. He begins by asking, "How do you tell the story of Christian faith?" If his film can be taken as a reply to his own question (though certainly nothing like a definitive answer), you can tell the story of faith by stripping away everything else. And that is exactly what happens to the protagonist of Silence, Padre Rodrigues. With as much witty, unsparing ruthlessness as the Japanese Inquisitors, though with far more compassionate intent, Silence breaks down Rodrigues's assumptions, the things he clings to as truth but which are actually more related to cultural perceptions, his church's laws, and his own ego than any immutable truth. Once these things are painfully taken from Rodrigues, what is left?

These are only my first impression thoughts. I suspect this is the kind of film that will reveal something else on my second and third viewings. The story is dramatically straightforward and easy to follow, but its implications are startlingly dense, and lead to a multitude of moral, historical, and religious interpretations. Silence has the power to challenge and productively unsettle anyone who open themselves to its line of questioning, no matter their beliefs or ethnicity.

On first look, the visceral qualities and vibrant humanity of Silence resonate with me even more than any one interpretation of "what it means". The production values are phenomenal - it is a detailed and immersive recreation of Edo-period Japan, brought to life with beautiful cinematography. Scorsese's camera pays particular attention to hands and faces, to foggy landscapes and symmetrical Japanese architecture. His filmmaking recalls many of classic cinema's greats, from Japanese masters like Kenji Mizoguchi and Akira Kurosawa to European transcendentalist filmmakers like Carl Dreyer and Roberto Rossellini, but it remains very much a singular, personal vision.

The characters are unforgettable. Padre Rodrigues is an immensely complex character and Andrew Garfield is up to the challenge, charting out Rodrigues's turbulent psychological journey from beginning to end with piercing emotional truth. Rodrigues vacillates between steadfast faith and crippling angry doubt, cowardice and bravado, selfless love and arrogance, and Garfield shows us how all these various attributes belong to one personality, while making Rodrigues's core sincerity and goodness clear enough that we, as viewers, are never allowed to feel superior despite his faults. Even with a distracting half-assed Portuguese accent (I don't understand - if they're speaking English and not Portuguese, why bother?), it's a tremendous performance.

The entire cast impresses. Adam Driver gets less screen time than expected as Padre Garrpe, but has a striking presence as always. His unique facial features look especially gaunt and severe here, like a stern religious icon brought to life. The normally intimidating Liam Neeson looks deflated, his Padre Ferreira is a defeated and spiritually crippled man - though fascinating, subtle notes in his performance suggest that may not be the whole truth. Shinya Tsukamato radiates courage as Mokichi, a Kirishitan martyr. His faith is not only hope in the afterlife, but an assertion of his own value in the face of a feudal system that denies him dignity - the sequence where he is strung up on a cross in the surf, quietly singing a hymn even as the waves relentlessly beat his body, is at once horrific and beautiful. Tadanobu Asano compels as the Japanese authorities' interpreter to Rodrigues, a jovial sadist who is fascinated and disgusted by the proud Rodrigues, and knows the exact words to undercut the priest's sense of superiority. Issey Ogata's performance as Inquisitor Inoue might be the most unexpected, in part because it's unrecognizably different from the only other Ogata performance I've seen, as the businessman in Edward Yang's Yi Yi who is a paragon of kindness and joy. In Silence Ogata is joltingly bizarre and comic - his Inoue uses flamboyantly pronounced courtly manners to disarm Rodrigues before dismantling his pride with wicked wit and insight.

But the most affecting character in Silence might be Kichijiro, played by Yosuke Kubozuka. In addition to acting, Kubozaka sometimes models for advertisements and fashion magazines in Japan, but his role as Kichijiro is about as unflattering and unglamorous as they come. Kichijiro is a filthy, bumbling alcoholic, cowardly and dedicated to self-preservation at all costs. His unending cycle of panicky betrayal followed by scrounging repentance grows increasingly absurd - but is also fundamentally human. Like J.R.R. Tolkien's Gollum, Kichijiro is a fascinating tragicomic creation whose weakness and naked desires reveal a lot of uncomfortable but truthful things about human nature.

"Uncomfortable but truthful" is, I think, an accurate way to describe Silence. This is a great movie.

Favorite First-Time Viewings of 2016

Apologies to any readers, as I've been dreadful in keeping up this blog! I've now started three reviews series (on Wong Kar-wai, Hayao Miyazaki, and the BBC Top 10) that I've left unfinished, and at this point are likely to remain that way - yikes. I still don't want to abandon this blog, though, and one of my desires for 2017 is to write more - including about movies, so expect this website to be more active in the coming months.

To kick it off, here's an unranked list of some older films that I watched for the first time this year and loved. I did not write reviews on most, but I'll leave brief thoughts on each, and why they moved / excited / fascinated me.

Tabu (F.W. Murnau, United States, 1931) - A tragic romance set in the South Seas that could be fairly accused of hokey exoticism (though a respectful portrayal of Polynesians for its time), but F.W. Murnau's expressionistic telling of this classic Romeo and Juliet story is movie magic, a joyful dream that turns into a nightmare. A silent film that creates a pure emotional experience through only its visuals, with an imaginative directness that puts most modern movies to shame.

Hellzapoppin' (H.C. Potter, United States, 1941) - Opens with a peppy musical number set in the depths of hell and keeps getting weirder from there. The humor is shamelessly corny, lowbrow vaudeville, but delightfully anarchic and creative, even 70+ years on. Also contains maybe the greatest, and almost certainly the most fearless, dance sequence in movie history.

Pather Panchali (Satyajit Ray, India, 1955) - A compassionate but unsentimental portrait of a year in the life of a regular Bengali family. It amazes me that this was Satyajit Ray's first film - its unforgettably specific characters and vivid evocation of life in rural India could only be the creation of a master filmmaker and keen observer of people.

Good Morning (Yasujiro Ozu, Japan, 1959) - A satirical but generous-hearted story of two young boys in newly-consumerist 1950s Japan who enter a vow of silence to protest their parents not buying a television. A rare comedy from Ozu, mostly a creator of quietly devastating melodramas, but his unique visual approach works beautifully for deadpan humor.

The Fabulous Baron Munchausen (Karel Zeman, Czhechoslovakia, 1962) - The tall tales of Baron Munchausen told through Karel Zeman's distinctive blend of live actors, animation, and stop-motion puppetry, like a psychedelic pop-art storybook brought to life. Fun and funny, also among the most visually inventive films I've seen.

Kwaidan (Masaki Kobayashi, Japan, 1964) - An anthology of four classic Japanese ghost stories. A horror film, but not one built for cheap thrills; a creepy, sublime and gorgeous excursion into the dark heart of folktales.

Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors (Sergei Parajanov, Ukraine, 1965) - Director Sergei Parajanov, a Georgian-born Armenian who did not play along with the rules of the USSR and spent much of his life in prison for it, had a style and approach to storytelling unlike any other. His films are wild, mythic immersions into forgotten ways of life and viewing the world - in this case, those of the Ukrainian Hustul culture. Soviet censors hated it for its religious and sensual imagery, but many ethnographers, historians, hippies, theologians, romantics, and adventurous movie-lovers over the years have embraced it. A one-of-a-kind movie.

A New Leaf (Elaine May, United States, 1971) - A very dark but ultimately good-natured comedy that ranks among the funniest movies I've ever seen. Directed, written by, and starring Elaine May, who is a genius, also showcases a brilliant comic performance from Walter Matthau.

Solaris (Andrei Tarkovsky, Russia, 1972) - A slow, sinister, spiritual experience, mysterious and soulful as science-fiction storytelling should be but so rarely is.

The Tree of Wooden Clogs (Ermanno Olmi, Italy, 1978) - A small-scale epic that shows the lives of a hard-laboring, devotedly Catholic peasant family in nineteenth-century Italy, based on stories from director Olmi's own ancestors. Small moments of unadorned honesty accumulate to make a film that radiates truth, both a religious and humbly human work of art.

Kagemusha (Akira Kurosawa, Japan, 1980) - Akira Kurosawa is just the greatest. My review.

A Brighter Summer Day (Edward Yang, Taiwan, 1991) - Has the expansive detail, thematic depth and character complexity of a great novel - also, at 4 hours long, the intimidating density of one, but it's worth the effort. Roger Ebert has famously called the movies "a machine that generates empathy". After watching A Brighter Summer Day, I really felt that I understood this time and place, this community, and the people who lived there.

The Long Day Closes (Terence Davies, United Kingdom, 1992) - An impressionistic autobiography of Terence Davies as a boy in working-class 1950s Liverpool. On the surface it's a lovely, stream-of-consciousness reverie, a nostalgic trip through memories of family, school, church, movies and music of the era. Hidden in plain sight are deep currents of bittersweet mixed emotions, recalling the happiness and the guilt of that time in life (Davies was gay, and just beginning to realize it at the age portrayed), and a sweet tribute to his beloved family. Most autobiography feels like misguided attempts at squeezing complex lives into simplistic narratives, if not outright narcissism, but The Long Day Closes is something different, like witnessing the raw materials of a personality in formation.

More movies I loved - because the 13 listed above are just a few of the awesome movies I watched for the first time this year. Here's some more that I will remember and value for a long time:

• The Abominable Dr. Phibes (Robert Fuest, United Kingdom, 1971)
• Alice in the Cities (Wim Wenders, Germany, 1974)
• Allegro non Troppo (Bruno Bozzetto, Italy, 1976)
• Ashes of Time (Wong Kar-wai, Hong Kong, 1994) / my review
• Cafe Lumiere (Hou Hsiao-Hsien, Japan, 2003)
• Children in the Wind (Hiroshi Shimizu, Japan, 1937)
• Dead of Night (multiple directors, United Kingdom, 1945)
• Dragon Gate Inn (King Hu, Taiwan, 1967)
• Fallen Angels (Wong Kar-wai, Hong Kong, 1995)
• Flash Gordon (Mike Hodges, United Kingdom, 1980)
• The Flight of the Red Balloon (Hou Hsiao-Hsien, France / Taiwan, 2007)
• Flowers of Shanghai (Hou Hsiao-Hsien, Taiwan, 1998)
• Head (Bob Rafelson, United States, 1968)
• The Heartbreak Kid (Elaine May, United States, 1972)
• The Hidden Fortress (Akira Kurosawa, Japan, 1958)
• Maborosi (Hirokazu Kore-eda, Japan, 1995)
• Mafioso (Alberto Lattuada, Italy, 1962)
• The Naked Island (Kaneto Shindo, Japan, 1960)
• Raise the Red Lantern (Zhang Yimou, China, 1991) / my review
• Red Beard (Akira Kurosawa, Japan, 1965)
• Sanjuro (Akira Kurosawa, Japan, 1962)
• The Saragossa Manuscript (Wojciech Has, Poland, 1965) / my review
• Sazen Tange and the Pot Worth a Million Ryo (Sadao Yamanaka, Japan, 1935)
• Them! (Gordon Douglas, United States, 1954)
• Throne of Blood (Akira Kurosawa, Japan, 1957)
• Topsy-Turvy (Mike Leigh, United Kingdom, 1999)
• The Valley of the Bees (Frantiscek Vlacil, Czechoslovakia, 1968) / my review
• Wings of Desire (Wim Wenders, Germany, 1987)
• Yojimbo (Akira Kurosawa, Japan, 1961)