Flowers of Shanghai
dir.: Hou Hsiao-hsien
NR, 120 min.
Showing Tuesday and Wednesday at Sarratt Cinema
Watching Flowers of Shanghai, a portrait of Chinese brothel life near the close of the 1800s, is like viewing a still life from a moving camera placed within the painted frame. Set entirely within the confines of an elegant Shanghai “flower house,” the images are lit and composed with a care that seems almost too rich for movies, at least since the days Josef von Sternberg walked the earth. Each frame is a window on the past. Oil lamps bathe every shot in a fog of firelight, and that glow reflects off jewels, walls lined with expensive collectibles, and skin. So immersive is this atmosphere that when a character looks up from a banquet table and asks what’s happening in the street, roughly an hour into the movie, it’s a shock to be reminded of a world outside.
Remove the visual splendor, though, and there’s a world where women are worth only as much as they can collect from a man, and all interactions, no matter how petty or intimate, are handled as negotiations. There are two main characters in Flowers of Shanghai: the aging mistress Crimson (Michiko Hada) and her customer Master Wang (Tony Leung Chiu Wai, from John Woo’s Hard-Boiled), who torments himself with love for two women. Yet they are kept at the same physical distance as all the other characters. Flowers of Shanghai has no close-ups, only meticulously composed long shots that frame the “flowers” in the lavish surroundings their customers have bought for them.
These long shots are a signature of Hou Hsiao-hsien, the Taiwanese director whose fame as one of the world’s emerging masters was spread by a touring retrospective last year. Flowers of Shanghai recalls a time before the birth of movies, evoked as much by the exotic splendor of the décor as by his technique. Set in a period before the invention of montage, each vignette is a single unbroken shot that ends with a fade-out, as the camera pans across elaborate tableaux. Within these shots, the objects and subjects may remain immobile, but our perspective on them continually changes. Their position in the frame often corresponds to a shift in power.
At the same time, Flowers of Shanghai never shows any physical contact between the girls and their customers. Faces and hands are the only flesh shown, and Hou has been criticized for glossing over prostitution by leaving sex out of the picture. But that says more about the critics than about the movie. Sorry, dudes, there are no orgy scenes or strip shows, no heart-of-gold hookers who put out for kicks and kindness. The only interaction Hou shows is the only kind that matters in this setting: business. The girls are bought, sold, and discussed as if they were collector’s items; their names tell the story: Jade, Emerald, Crystal, Treasure.
The formal rigor of Hou’s style makes this a hard movie to warm up to, at least on one viewing, but it’s far from emotionless. Even as it ravishes the eye, Flowers of Shanghai nurses an ache of denied pleasures—love, unpurchased human contact, freedom—in each precisely controlled frame. As the camera prowls back and forth in those airless rooms, among all those untouched knickknacks, the confinement builds to a kind of claustrophobic intensity. The cumulative effect is devastating, and it isn’t even fully felt until the last image fades. That frame isn’t just a window; it’s a cage.
—Jim Ridley
Sold Americana
Playwright and director David Mamet has made a Hollywood movie—only it’s not set in Hollywood. The title, State and Main, recalls other streets where directors have told tales of Tinseltown: Hollywood and Vine, maybe, or Sunset Boulevard. And the movie people he follows are in the best tradition of hyperbolic Hollywood caricatures: the autocratic director, the vaguely foreign cinematographer, the intimidated screenwriter with literary ambitions, the leading man with uncontrollable sexual appetites, the leading lady who suddenly gets cold feet about the nude scene. But this intersection is on the opposite coast, in the sleepy New England town of Waterford, Vt., as far away from the studio phonies and luxury SUVs as it’s possible to get.
Or is it? Mamet populates Waterford with a collection of stereotypes as exaggerated as the L.A. crew he drops into their midst. There’s a gee-willikers freckled kid obsessed with baseball, a kindly old doctor with a bow tie, oldsters arguing town politics at the diner, and a rotund mayor with a social-climbing wife. In the end, his movie isn’t about either polar-opposite group (which may not be so different after all); it’s about finding yourself at home with whatever collection of weirdos will welcome you in.
Mamet’s writer character, Joseph Turner White (gently played by fellow three-namer Philip Seymour Hoffman), is a playwright on his first movie set. The Old Mill, Joe says, is a film about purity, and from his first moments in Waterford, he seems to be on a quest for something unspoiled. He gradually moves out of the orbit of the frenetic, time-obsessed movie people and into the world of Ann Black (Rebecca Pidgeon, Mamet’s wife), a used bookstore owner who’s not worried about being back at her business at the hour her sign indicates she will be. But the town may be losing the very purity that attracts Joe, as more of its residents get sucked into the gravitational field of the movie business.
Meanwhile, The Old Mill’s star, Bob Barrenger (Alec Baldwin), who’s already gotten the production kicked out of New Hampshire because of his predilection for jailbait, knocks over the town’s only traffic light while on a bender with the diner owner’s daughter (Julia Stiles). Soon Waterford is crawling with British tabloid reporters and the whole thing is about to go to court, with Joe the writer as the sole witness. To what family will he choose to be loyal—the one that could make him famous and spread his art around the world, or the one that lives by the motto of its (defunct) newspaper, “You shall not bear false witness”?
State and Main is often hilarious, but veteran Mamet viewers will want to look beyond the light comedy for strange and persistent themes, signaled by repeated tropes of dialogue and character. Just as in his last two films, The Spanish Prisoner and The Winslow Boy, both of which masquerade as simple entertainments, Mamet is doing something under the surface, revealed by the repeated inability of his characters to finish their thoughts, by the persistence of time lines and schedules written across walls, and by the recurring focus on the difference between lies and fiction.
The film’s most winning quality, however, is found in Rebecca Pidgeon, an actress whose mannered line readings some find unbearable. I’ve always liked her, but in State and Main I finally understood what she represents to Mamet. Her forthright gaze and wide dark eyes are where his characters look when they want to see things clearly. And although the director can sometimes play with that idea (see The Spanish Prisoner), we won’t often go wrong if we too search there for Mamet’s kind of purity.
—Donna Bowman
Judgment days
Whenever there’s a new movie based on a historical event, you can count on some smug joker to make the crack, “Why would anybody want to see that? We already know how it ends!” What the wag is missing is that we go to the movies for more than just the diversions and surprises of plot. To become involved in the reactions of characters to events that we know mainly from the static text of history books—that’s why we flock to a restaging of the Passion play, or the sinking of the Titanic, or, in the case of the Roger Donaldson-directed, David Self-penned political thriller Thirteen Days, the Cuban missile crisis.
Thirteen Days is first and foremost a re-creation of the hour-by-hour escalating drama that gripped the world in October 1962, prompted by a Soviet installation of missiles in Cuba. President Kennedy ordered a blockade of Soviet ships heading toward Cuba and threatened an invasion if Kruschev didn’t have the missiles dismantled and removed—a threat that he knew might lead to a series of retaliations and ultimately bring about nuclear strikes.
With hindsight, knowing what we now know about the fragility of the Soviet government, it seems absurd to imagine that the Russians would’ve risked certain devastation. But Thirteen Days has grounded its tension in the inscrutability of the acknowledged enemy in early-’60s America, so Donaldson and Self instead engage a handful of insidious internal foes: pride, politics, and an outdated set of rules of engagement that had the military blindly knocking over dominoes.
Sometimes the filmmakers overdo the dramatization, particularly when they show the joint chiefs of staff boiling over in the background like humiliated Bond villains. And from the moment Kevin Costner shows up as Kennedy adviser Kenny O’Donnell and starts speaking in a ridiculous simulation of a Boston accent—within the first 10 minutes of the movie, in other words—Thirteen Days is as hilarious as if Donaldson had directed everyone to speak in rhyme and use Donald Duck voices. It doesn’t help that the O’Donnell character seems to play an awfully big role for such a minor historical figure.
But there’s a fantasy element to O’Donnell’s participation that becomes apparent as the movie rolls on, and it reaches a revelatory stage right about the time that Costner’s accent becomes less distracting. Frankly, it doesn’t much matter whether O’Donnell was really as vital a player as this movie makes him out to be; his job in the story is to stand in for the audience, to let us see the torturous decision-making process of the president and his staff.
And that’s what Thirteen Days is really about, rather than following a time line that leads us to an ending that we already know. It’s about Bruce Greenwood’s fully rounded performance as John F. Kennedy and Steven Culp’s charismatic turn as brother Robert, assisted by a staff of well-known character actors who bring their own assurances of competence. It’s about the old faces and the new faces, staring each other down in a world that had changed more than any of them knew. It’s about powerful men fingering their wedding rings and praying that the coins they flip behind closed doors won’t land on the heads of the next generation. And that’s a story whose ending we still do not entirely know.
—Noel Murray
