Flowers of Shanghai: Inside the Dream

“We find ourselves immediately plunged into the dreamworld of flowers—inside a space designed to entice as an escape from ordinary reality.”

In The Sing-Song Girls of Shanghai, the story proper begins with the end of the author’s reverie. Brought back to earth, we find ourselves on the bridge leading into Shanghai’s International Settlement, an area controlled by Western colonial powers and containing the so-called flower houses in which the city’s storied courtesans lived and worked. Flowers of Shanghai condenses this lead-in into a single introductory intertitle that places the story within the British Concession, where the most elite of the flower houses were located. The film’s first scene, however, dispenses with any realistic markers that would help viewers further orient themselves in the late-Qing setting. Instead, we find ourselves immediately plunged into the dreamworld of flowers—inside a space designed to entice as an escape from ordinary reality, enmeshed in its heady atmosphere of sensory indulgence and material resplendence. The dark frame is punctured by the illumination of an oil lamp, and faces gradually emerge from the fog of the shadows to reveal a high-spirited dinner banquet underway.

The scene is captured in a single eight-minute shot that affords ample time to take in the surfeit of visual detail: the men whose Manchurian queues signal their official standing, the courtesans seated slightly behind them in accordance with custom, the intricate embroidery of the robes worn by all, the porcelain and foods laid upon the table, the sumptuous decor of the adjoining rooms, and the parade of servants. The fine silks and polished woods glow with a lustrous sheen under the light of the oil lamps. But even despite the leisurely unfolding of the shot, viewers may find themselves uncertain in their attention, thrown off-balance by a camera that refuses to stay in one place. Its drifting and panning generate a constantly changing perspective that subtly diagrams the hierarchical relationships among the characters. The image fades to a black screen, upon which the title Flowers of Shanghai appears.

A comparison between a communal meal scene in A City of Sadness and one in Flowers of Shanghai illustrates how familiar elements are given a strikingly different treatment in the latter. In A City of Sadness, set in the immediate aftermath of Taiwan’s liberation from Japanese colonial rule, a group of compatriots sits around a table in a restaurant. When their banter is interrupted by the sound of singing from outside, one of the diners opens a large window. The group recognizes the tune as “The Song of the Exiles,” a patriotic, anticolonial ballad referring to Japan’s 1931 invasion of Manchuria, and joins in the singing. The winds of imminent political change rush into this private gathering, allowing us to grasp its place in a larger historical struggle for nationhood and exemplifying the fluid transpositions between the momentous and the quotidian in Hou’s work.

In an exchange that displays Emerald’s authority, the cruelty of the circumstances jars against the gorgeous splendor of the image. She sits next to another courtesan, listening to the latter’s account of her most recent beating; the bruises on her arm are covered by the beautiful crimson silk of her sleeve, which complements the vivid jewel tones worn by the other characters in the shot. Through the doorway behind them can be glimpsed the ornate filigree railing of the central stairway, which casts a magnified shadow on the wall. The floral motif of these patterns is repeated in the embroidery of the women’s clothing, the adornments in their hair, and the cut flowers decorating the space. The women both stand out against and are absorbed into a decorative composition, becoming equivalent to the things that surround them—just as the professional names they assume echo those of the precious stones given to them. In this ornamental manner of depiction, we can read the contradictory positions of subjecthood and objecthood occupied by the courtesans. Despite enjoying a degree of financial agency and public visibility otherwise denied to Chinese women of this period, they were simultaneously unfree, tied to their houses in a contract of debt bondage. Courtesans were bought and kept—not by male masters, as the film makes clear, but rather by the older women who headed the enclaves. But even so, by succeeding in their profession, they could bring wealth to their houses, gain in power, and, like Emerald, eventually buy their freedom.

The most powerful scenes of Flowers of Shanghai are those in which Emerald cunningly negotiates the terms of her release and executes the purchase of her liberty, counting out one by one her items of jewelry and clothing like someone who understands her exact value in the calculations of others. Her path is forecast earlier in the film, in one of the very few scenes in which sunlight perceptibly floods the frame, and the outside world makes its presence felt, even if the camera never exits the interior. The sun cuts through the crepuscular haze, chases away the fog, and lights a way out of the dream.