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Flowers of Shanghai is a 1998 Taiwanese drama film directed by Hou Hsiao-hsien. It is based on the novel The Sing-song Girls of Shanghai (1892) by Han Bangqing, which was originally written in the Wu language ( 吳語) and translated into Mandarin Chinese by Eileen Chang.
Oct 17, 1998 · Flowers of Shanghai: Directed by Hsiao-Hsien Hou. With Tony Leung Chiu-wai, Michiko Hada, Michelle Reis, Carina Lau. In the "flower houses" (upscale brothels) of Shanghai, various interweaving stories of love, loyalty, and deceit play out subtly.
- (4.1K)
- Drama
- Hsiao-Hsien Hou
- 1998-10-17
The Sing-song Girls of Shanghai, also translated as Shanghai Flowers or Biographies of Flowers by the Seashore, is an 1892 novel by Han Bangqing. The novel, the first such novel to be serially published, chronicles lives of prostitutes in Shanghai in the late 19th century.
- Bangqing Han
- 1892
In addition to translating several prominent American novelists, including Ernest Hemingway, into Chinese, she also translated Han Bangqing’s 1892 Wu language novel The Sing-song Girls of Shanghai into Mandarin; in 1998, the director Hou Hsiao-hsien adapted her version of the book into Flowers of Shanghai, a lush, slow and faintly soporific ...
- Philippa Snow
Aug 14, 2001 · 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.
- (191)
- Cantonese
- NTSC, DVD, Widescreen, Subtitled, Color
- 2 hours and 5 minutes
Oct 5, 1998 · Summary In Shanghai in the 1880s there are four elegant brothels (flower houses): each has an auntie (called madam), a courtesan in her prime, older servants, and maturing girls in training. The men gather around tables of food, playing drinking games. An opium pipe is at hand.
A floating camera drifts through the candlelit, opium-drenched dens of 1880s Shanghai in Hou’s elegant film of longing and long takes, adapted from Han Bangqing’s 1892 Wu language novel The Sing-song Girls of Shanghai, a classic that was translated into Mandarin Chinese and English by Chang.
