Critics reviews

A superlative display of Hou's peerless unhinging of time. Tony Leung's pensive, faraway gaze—while partaking of opium, drinking games, or lamenting a troubled love—almost singlehandedly rustles the film's temporal continuity, wresting viewers' attention from the there-and-then of the film's action to some ruminative, lyrical beyond.

While its oblique style may make for a difficult viewing experience for those unfamiliar with Hou's work, if you're able to surrender to its languorous wavelength it makes for a mesmerizing experience.

[Flowers of Shanghai] is a film constructed like no other: it doesn't follow the conventions of gradual and deliberate narrative unfolding; it doesn't vary sets greatly; it doesn't distinguish the characters from one another in particularly obvious ways. It is a riddle that almost exclusively employs a third person limited narrative eye and ear through which the audience absorbs story information. The audience is then forced to puzzle over its meaning and implications.

...After what seems an unbearable wait, Hou fades out and back in to the master shot of the room. Maybe what we (or I) look for in a "perfect" film isn't so ephemeral at all—merely an artist willing to stick to an aesthetic tack rigorously, even at the expense of immediate narrative ease or satisfaction. The fade here is an amazing gesture because it's totally illogical within the confines of conventional cinematic grammar.

Time does not so much pass as pass out; reflecting perhaps the film's unabashed opium smoking, a scene will fade unexpectedly into black, then reawaken, minutes or months later, in the same lacquered interior burnished by filtered light, or in a different one very much like it. The tableaux are like the frenzies of some gaudy insect trapped in amber.

Hou Hsiao-hsien crafts a visually hypnotic and intricately fascinating portrait of love, power, and servitude in The Flowers of Shanghai. By confining the scenes to interior shots of the Shanghai flower houses, Hou portrays the created, artificial world - the unsustainable illusion - of the flower house patrons. In essence, the flower houses are an idealized reflection of the patrons' own ambivalent feelings between love and passion, obligation and generosity, commitment and fidelity.

Hou explores his subject in completely aestheticized terms, shooting each leisurely scene with a gently moving camera that literally caresses the people, places, and objects it passes across. There's little sense of the physical realities faced by the "flower women" languishing in this male-controlled society, but that is the only substantial shortcoming of this cinematically exquisite work.

The film opens with a brilliant seven-minute take; the languid yet precise cinematography throughout gives it the seductive power of a drug-induced dream.

Each scene is a continuous take, bracketed by fades up from and back to black; the one (crucial) exception is the insert of Wang's point-of-view as he witnesses Ms Crimson's unfaithfulness. Hauntingly sad, the film elegantly deranges the viewer's sense of time: this seemingly unchanging world is in fact riven by off-screen incidents - which change everything.