Where the Stress Falls

Blue

Wong Kar-Wai's My Blueberry Nights arrived in local theaters like a vague apparition: the lukewarm advanced word didn't quell in any way my desire to see the film, but it made me lower my expectations, which is difficult to do, given my appreciation for Wong's work. The resulting experience was definitely mixed. Wong's dialog sounded occasionally campy and somewhat stilted; the metaphors for transition seemed a bit too neat and standard (trains, doorways, keys that unlock doors); the acting seemed to lay somewhere between the purposeful artificiality of a stage production and the spontaneity of an unscripted film. I have to admit that I'm not a fan of Natalie Portman's approach to character, in this film or in others, although her wayward sassiness here is a relatively nice complement to Norah Jones' somewhat flat, perhaps even lethargic, performance (I'm borrowing the term "flat" from a source I can't recall at the moment; I'm also wondering if the flatness is intentional, a sort of verbal and physical manifestation of the emotional drubbing her character receives). But, these caveats aside, I found My Blueberry Nights to be a somewhat beautiful, poignant film. Wong's adeptness at creating visual mood, his characteristic use of color and compression, framing and close-up, inform this film thoroughly, and he appropriately mirrors the varied landscapes and settings of his new-found territory (the United States) in different spaces, from the cramped quarters of small cafes and seedy bars, to the wide-open Nevada desert. In addition, I don't think anyone has ever photographed Rachel Weisz more beautifully. Whether she's half-drunk or enraged or in a saddened stupor, or reclaiming remnants of her dignity in her character's own limited way, Wong's camera truly flatters her. Most of all, Wong's first English-language film carries, with admittedly somewhat less efficacy than his previous work, that visceral, chest-tightening sense of the bittersweetness of change, that burning compulsion, from which everyone in this film "suffers", to hold on to a past that cannot be reclaimed while trying anxiously to understand the present and the future. Wong surveys this experience in the lives of his characters, all of whom have had, or have, people departing from their lives. He surveys it in the simple, complementary shots of an apartment at once occupied, then vacant. And he surveys it in the all-too-brief moment (that's the point, of course) in which Chan Marshall (a.k.a. Cat Power) appears, like a pleasant flash, as Jude Law's ex-girlfriend, in the midst of yet another transition, preparing for yet another departure. The film's melodrama, its patness, limit the film's potential; even the scene with Law and Marshall contains those repeated references to time-worn symbols of locks and doors. But, at least in their essence, moments like these keep the film in line with some of Wong's other work, not only thematically, but visually: he shoots Law and Marshall from the other side of a cafe window, a physical marker in certain ways of the division these individuals long to rectify.

TIFF 2007, Part 1: A Chinese Memoir

My arrival at the 2007 Toronto International Film Festival was not all that propitious. It began with a relatively brief but annoying interrogation by immigration (for no good reason) and continued with unusually hot weather, heavy traffic on the way to the hotel, and my fear that the Wavelengths series of avant-garde films might be unavailable because of someone's unwise decision to move it to perhaps the smallest theater in all of Canada. A challenge then seemed to face me the following morning: Wang Bing's Fengming: A Chinese Memoir began at 9:30 A.M., which felt more like 6:30 to me; not necessarily a problem, except that this is a three-hour documentary consisting of extremely long, static takes of a woman sitting on a couch and recounting her experiences in Mao's China. Fortunately, I needn't have worried. This film engaged me from its first shot to its final dissolve and on occasion was so moving that I had difficulty maintaining my composure.

Fengming's story is provocative precisely because it is not mediated by anything, not by other images (not even the one above, which appeared in the TIFF catalog entry for the film), by historical footage, or any of the common elements of standard documentary filmmaking. She relays her personal and family history from the confines of her living room for most of the film's duration, and Wang's camera almost dissolves into the ether. As darkness descends towards the end of the first day and Wang asks Fengming to turn on a light, I felt as if I were in that room (the cinematic "fourth wall" entirely collapsed). Wang's use of cutting has a similar economy to it. While, on rare occasion, he cuts to close-ups of Fengming or to shots of other rooms, doorways, or halls in her apartment, he largely replaces the technique with simple gestures within the frame that have the same rhythmic effect: a telephone ringing in another room; Fengming leaving her chair to use the restroom or taking out a handkerchief to wipe her eyes or her nose or her mouth. Wang uses the gestures of everyday life to edit and order his film, to shape Fengming's story. His approach might be the purest form of narrative.

In addition, he interviews no one else (not even other family members), provides no other voices to echo or qualify Fengming's story, and, in doing so, he opens up the film. The conventional wisdom that documentaries should ultimately strive for balance or objectivity ignores the potent truths in subjectivity, in a single, personal memory, even one that is told too well to give every moment of it the full gravitas that a more impromptu session might convey. Fengming's account is structured, linear, full of shape. In 1949, she gave up college to join the Communist revolution in China and became a loyal, diligent believer in the supposed promises of Mao's program. But when her husband wrote several articles critiquing the excessively bureaucratic nature of the state, he and Fengming were accused of being class enemies by their own comrades-in-arms, who interpreted their views as anti-Socialist, anti-Party, and "rightist." The couple were interred in labor camps, sat through weeks of rigorous interrogations known as "struggle sessions," and either attempted or contemplated suicide. Fengming's focus, and the center of her family's tragedy, lay in trying to reunite with her husband, who eventually died prematurely, and, in later years, to find closure to her grief and help her children connect in some way with her family's past.

One of the film's implications is that we can find meaning in the ongoing structuring and re-structuring of memory, and that this very process is perhaps as inherently interesting, and purposeful, as the personal story itself. This process becomes even more of a challenge in light of the fact that it is an affront to the very nation that for generations has condemned numerous forms of political and personal recollection as criminal. And in this sense Fengming: A Chinese Memoir gravitates beyond sheer personal history. It is the history of thousands of people, even millions, who lived in Mao's China or in Nazi Europe or in Stalin's Russia. Wang's film reveals the patent absurdities and the insanity of extremist politics, embodied in baseless yet rigidly expressed accusations about people's motivations, in the destruction of the routines of daily life, all often accompanied by the type of hollow euphemisms used by authoritarian regimes: class enemies, as Fengming explains, were to be "rehabilitated," as if freedom of conscience were a disease or a handicap. Such euphemisms allowed Mao and others to turn individuals into abstractions and to rationalize the abuses of human rights and the failed social experiments that marred not only China's history, but the entire twentieth century.

Style and Purpose

Hou Hsiao-Hsien in one of world cinema's great formalists, known for a rigorous signature style, for his use of long takes, ellipses, slow tracking and panning shots, for a variety of techniques that challenge and alter the conventional visual grammar of film. His work is also deeply historicist, enmeshed in milieus, implicitly engaging national politics or culture, and yet it remains somewhat above its settings; Flowers of Shanghai is detached enough to observe with real incisiveness and relative objectivity just how tyrannical cultural traditions can sometimes be. Hou's Three Times, which I've been viewing repeatedly in parts, is politically and historically informed like much of Hou's work and embodies his characteristic formalism. He divides the narrative into a triptych of vignettes exploring the lack of connection between two lovers, played by Shu Qi and Chang Chen. In the first segment, "A Time for Love," which some have likened to the films of Wong Kar-Wai (though, in fact, Wong's films are typically heavier and more melancholic), Chang is ultimately separated from Shu by military service in 1966, during Chiang Kai-Shek's presidency. In a "Time for Freedom," set in 1911, Chang's political activities as a reformer during Japan's occupation of his country keep him from maintaining a consistent relationship with his courtesan (Shu). In the final vignette, "A Time for Youth," Chang and Shu portray young lovers struggling with rootlessness in modern Taipei.

I'm greatly impressed by the film's visual beauty and by Hou's seamless connection of visual style and narrative purpose. The ellipsis, in which a segment of time or an event is deliberately absent, is like the pregnant pause in speech or the caesura in music; it says as much as the actual content surrounding it. In a scene in which Shu braids Chang's hair, Hou's nearly seamless ellipses convey both the passing of time and the elusive closeness of this courtesan and her client. He also reverses angles or repositions the actors within the frame after each cut, breaking the 180-degree rule and abandoning general rules of symmetry. At other times, he  uses simple, static images to impart thematic meaning; the opening and closing of doors and the placement of doorways in the center of the frame add to the film's sense of transition, or to the yearning for transition in the face of stasis. Shu longs for a life beyond the brothel, like her fellow courtesan, Ah Mei, who is marrying and will soon leave (and the recurring images of doorways in "A Time for Freedom" recall Shu's gazes through windows and doors in "A Time to Love"). Most of all, Hou, largely abandoning the cut at numerous points throughout the film, uses the panning shot and re-composition to impart his characters' emotional struggles. While sitting for tea, Shu discusses her potential future with Chang, who, as usual, is leaving to continue his reformist activities:

"So you leave tomorrow." Shu says. "When will you come back?" Hou structures "A Time for Freedom" as if it were a silent film, using intertitles for dialog:

"I will assist Mr. Liang with his plan for a newspaper," Chang replies. "I may return here at any time." Hou pans to the left as Shu turns while speaking:

With her in close-up (Hou usually uses medium-wide shots), Shu carefully explains the crux of the issue. "Last time you said that, in view of Ah Mei's situation, you felt compelled to help her. Now Madame is asking me to stay here longer. I would like to know whether you have plans for me." Shu places all her hope on the prospect of marrying Chang and on his political sympathies.  Hou then pans right to Chang to record his response. He looks aways and says absolutely nothing.

While Hou keeps the camera on Chang to emphasize the man's own inner tension, Shu crosses the room behind him; the camera then pans to her and refocuses. She wipes away tears:

This single emotional statement, consisting of one elegant long take, is capped off by Shu crying outside of Chang's view. Hou doesn't belabor the point (he soon pans back and then dissolves the frame to black), but it is no less clear because of that. Shu is too polite, too full of pride, to express her sorrow in front of Chang, and her demeanor heightens the inherent tragedy of her relationship with a man who is either too preoccupied by his own political ambitions or too noble and sincere a reformer to take another wife, even if doing so will free her from the traditional life that has enveloped her. Politics, history, the world intrude. And in Hou's hands, form follows function to heartbreaking effect.

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Three Times (Zui hao de shi guang, 2005). Written by Hou Hsiao-Hsien and Chu Tien-Wen. Directed by Hou Hsiao-Hsien. Images copyright  © 2006 IFC Films.

Equinox Flower and Ozu's Balanced Sensibility

Yasujiro Ozu's Equinox Flower (1958) was his first color film, and on the surface might have marked a significant shift for him; yet, in many ways, the film is remarkably consistent with his body of work. His static, low-level shots frame the actors and the interiors of homes; the narrative is economical and tightly controlled; the encroaching imprint of the West appears in subtle, seemingly cursory signs and conversations; the private dilemmas of families develop in simple, quiet, yet irrevocable ways. In addition to all these staples of his films, Equinox Flower reveals another consistent characteristic of Ozu's artistry: how his work is moving and meaningful in the simplest, gentlest manner, in the flash of a smile, the nod of a head, the turn of a frown, the expressive affirmation of a single "yes", the brief stare into the distance. After a crucial confrontation between Wataru Hirayama (Shin Saburi, pictured above) and his wife, Kiyoko (Kinuyo Tanaka), about their daughter's marriage plans, Ozu lingers on Kiyoko's slightly down-turned face as the complexity and the potential outcomes of her family's trouble manifest in her eyes and the curve of her mouth. In this patriarchal culture, Ozu has afforded the family matriarch the respect and emotional space she deserves and has allowed her to express her true self, to prove that she is hardly the compliant wife she is expected to be.

Ozu's respect for women marks Equinox Flower as the creation of a sympathetic mind. Setsuko (Ineki Arima), the Hirayamas' eldest daughter, wants to break with tradition by finding a husband by herself; her friend, Yukiko (Fujiko Yamamoto), gingerly resists her own mother's pressure to get her to marry an affluent physician. These women are representatives of a younger, more individualistic generation, one yearning to be free of burdensome traditions, and their confrontation with the unbending representative (namely, Wataru) of an old-fashioned generation forms the central drama of this film. Kiyoko, not entirely unsympathetic to her husband's concern about Setsuko's financial future, has the unenviable but vital task of finding the middle ground between parties whose vision of modern life is influenced not only by age but by seemingly irreconcilable values. Ozu presents Kiyoko in neutral colors, has her stand next to the bright red radio that broadcasts music through the Hirayamas' living room. By contrast, Wataru increasingly becomes shrouded by dark browns and grays, particularly after Setsuko returns home from visiting her boyfriend, when Wataru emerges from the cool darkness of an unlit room to confront his daughter. (Equinox Flower is not dramatically different from Ozu's other late work; the new color palette only, though nicely, augmented his methods for conveying his themes of conflict.)

Brilliantly, Ozu uses a form of narrative counterpoint to turn Wataru into one of his greatest of character studies. At the film's opening, Wataru, as a wedding guest, explains his envy for newlyweds who married out of love, not arrangement, while he coarsely recalls the old Japanese traditions that forged his own marriage; yet he cannot bestow the same grace upon his own daughter. To obtain a better understanding of his own family situation, Wataru meets with Fumiko (Yoshiko Kuga), an old friend's daughter who has broken custom by moving in with her boyfriend. While he listens intently, she admits she's happy, despite her lover's lowly and uncertain economic status; later, Yukiko asks Wataru for marital advice, and he tells her to marry whomever she wants. Yet he will not afford Setsuko any of these same considerations (and his attempt to give Fumiko spending money illustrates just how anxious he is about these women's economic futures). Most of all, in a particularly tender moment, Kiyoko reminisces about the family's togetherness during the war, despite their poverty. Wataru counters her memory by expressing his disdain for the experience, and, here, the truth of his character emerges.

He is not, in Ozu's beautifully balanced portrait, despicable; stubborn, to be sure, but not despicable. His adherence to the apparent wisdom of arranged marriages, his nearly monomaniacal focus on the economic stature of his daughter's potential husband, his resistance to Setsuko's desire for individual freedom, are the natural result of having lived through the hardships brought on by the Second World War. His stubbornness, additionally, is the natural response of a man accustomed, for most of his adult life, to supporting his family by working in characterless, uniform, drab-gray offices, by being a member of a society that has emphasized productivity, efficiency, security, and risk-free choices. And by keeping these elements either in the background, or by referring to them tangentially, Ozu never resorts to jejune commentaries on societal conditions, never lets Wataru's past experiences take the onus entirely away from his own personal idiosyncrasies, and, most of all, never entirely condemns Wataru or men with similar old-world concerns.

Instead, after observing how Wataru struggles to accept a younger generation's values and choices, Ozu places him in the center of the film's foremost symbol of transition, namely, a train. Wataru leaves the family's dilemmas behind him, both spatially and emotionally, traveling towards Hiroshima, Japan's own epicenter of change, where his daughter will likely find a new life, and where further transitions will undoubtedly, yet wonderfully, occur.

Late Autumn

In an era in which cinema, particularly in the United States, exemplifies what Susan Sontag once called a "combinatory and re-combinatory art," surviving on rehashed ideas, many filmmakers could learn a significant amount about cinema from a master like Yasujiro Ozu. His Late Autumn (1960) might not share the beautifully sustained and serene tone of his earlier masterpiece, Late Spring (1949), but it has the same essential story: a widowed parent, reliant on an only child, must ensure that the cycles of family and life continue by helping that child marry, even at the price of ensuing loneliness. The child feels a deep bond with the parent, fears change, and worries that a new relationship will entail the cruel abandonment of another. "That is how it is with parents and children," Akiko, played by the great Japanese actress Setsuko Hara, tells her daughter, Ayako (Yoko Tsukasa).

Using different source material, Ozu reworked the essential narrative of Late Spring by altering the relationship (mother and daughter, instead of father and daughter), changing the role the parent has in the daughter's marriage, and adding a trio of meddling, middle-aged businessmen whose machinations to find Ayako a suitor illustrate Japan's continuing patriarchal traditions, while their own eventual manipulation by one of Ayako's young friends suggests the very decline of those traditions ("we are no match for the girls these days," one of the men remarks). Like many of Ozu's family dramas, Late Autumn quietly delineates a single family's dilemmas and a national culture in flux; one of the men's daughters wears American clothes, attends baseball games, and adheres to the great post-war symbol of Americana, Elvis Presley. But Ozu's proficiency as a filmmaker ensures that each new survey of similar ideas is an achievement unto itself; here, Ozu's lighter tone and his occasional comic touches allow him to observe Japan's transitions without necessarily condemning or endorsing them.

Whatever differences Late Autumn might have with its predecessor, the similarities are more significant, particularly a quality that Michael Atkinson attributed to Late Spring that applies to the later film equally well: "Ozu's Zen-infused sensibility translates on film to something like the art form's nascent formal beauty: patiently watching little happen, and the meditative moments around the nonhappening, until it becomes crashingly apparent that lives are at stake and the whole world is struggling to be born." When the emotional drama between Akiko and Ayako finally, and fully, takes center stage, after the daughter has gradually developed a relationship with a young man, Late Autumn evolves into a richly beautiful, evocative film and narrows its focus to the changes experienced by mother and child. "If I find someone, what would you do?" Ayako asks. "Would you be lonely?" Akiko assures her that no price is too great for her child's happiness, but her daughter's omnipresence is not the only thing she'll miss; as Ozu carefully illustrates throughout the film, particularly on a vacation the the two take together, their freedom as single women will diminish as well.

Ozu renders these concerns and changes with characteristic visual skill. He traces the emotional boundaries of familial obligation, habit, expectation, and aspiration by occasionally lingering on his actors' faces, framing them in simple, centered compositions, and employing a relatively shallow depth-of-field. Moreover, at roughly an hour and twenty minutes into the film, comes a brilliant, touching moment. Mamiya (Shin Saburi), one of the meddling businessmen, tells Ayako that her mother has a chance to remarry and asks her how she feels about this. Realizing that her content, stable life with her mother will change abruptly, Ayako bows her head in sad contemplation. Ozu sustains the emotional note by showing a waitress arrive to deliver food and then cutting to a wider shot behind Ayako, as she continues to sit silently; her head remains lowered, while her presence in the center of the frame augments both her private emotional struggle and the general somberness of acknowledged, eventual separation.

This shot illustrates yet another method by which Ozu masterly observes and understands family dynamics, the complexity of transition, and people's emotional lives; he employs similar visual techniques later in the film, particularly when focusing on Akiko's seemingly tranquil but deeply felt reactions to the changes occurring around her, drawing out, as he did to moving effect in Late Spring and The End of Summer, themes of inevitable struggle and conflict. In Late Autumn, Akiko finds that life involves a struggle between freedom and sacrifice, between the independence and closeness these women shared as widow and single daughter, and Akiko's willingness to surrender their enjoyment of all that to the shifting, ensuing stages of her daughter's life.

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Michael Atkinson's statment about Late Spring taken from his essay "Home with Ozu", included with Criterion's edition of the film.

The End of Summer

Film critic Phillip Lopate once wrote that director Yasujiro Ozu's career "tends to provoke a religious hush, making it difficult for the critic to isolate the virtues and defects of individual films. Compounding the problem is Ozu's consistency: on the surface his pictures seem to share so many elements, resembling each other structurally and thematically, that it is not always possible even for an aficionado to disentangle in memory Late Autumn from An Autumn Afternoon, say."

Ozu's The End of Summer (1961), which Criterion recently released as part of their Late Ozu box set, reminds me that this is the sort of cinematic problem I don't mind facing; for if The End of Summer blurs at all into Ozu's other films, it does so at little or no expense to the experience of it. One remarkable consistency, for example, in Ozu's mature work is its austerity, which makes many other films seem needlessly, hopelessly cluttered, burdened by the excesses of plot or characterization, stifled by the affectations of style. The End of Summer is like many of Ozu's later films in this respect; without embellishment or histrionics, it focuses on family and the basic decisions that perfectly ordinary people face: whom to marry, whether or not to fulfill family expectations, how to live with the idiosyncrasies of parents and siblings, how to memorialize lost loved ones, whether to embrace or deny traditional cultural and familial values. Through conversations and, particularly, shifting points of view, these issues seep quietly into The End of Summer and move it forward unobtrusively, working like gentle undercurrents. A father surreptitiously reignites an old affair and worries his family; the family business struggles in an era of mergers and large corporations; two sisters feel pressure to marry the respectable suitors they don't love.

The film's austerity also lies, as expected, in Ozu's characteristically unadorned canvas, his trademark low-level shots, his abandonment of the zoom and the pan, and his refusal to use traditional dissolves or the closing iris. The simple, stationary "pillow" shots of the Japanese landscape and the interiors of the family's home mark narrative transition and convey spatial presence and absence, the sense of coming and going, of things changing and going awry. Noriko (Yoko Tsukasa), one of the daughters, calls the family doctor to help her ailing father, and the ring of the telephone and ensuing silence reverberate across images of empty rooms and hallways, the visual ellipsis connecting the moment of the phone call with the later instance of the doctor's diagnosis (a brilliantly simple transition, in my opinion). Akiko's (Setsuko Hara's) apparent, unexpected absence at a bar where her affluent suitor awaits underscores an unspoken but fateful decision about their potential marriage; here, Ozu shows us the effect of her decision on her suitor, but not the decision itself.

Ozu's seamless visual minimalism creates an appropriate, understated tapestry for his central concern. The End of Summer, as the title implies, is about the inevitability of change, the temptation to resist it, and the fading of tradition and the onset of modernity. Neon lights bring Osaka to life at night; the right angles of the city's concrete and steel structures stand off against the curved rooftops of older Japanese temples; the imposing figures of American suitors, shot from shortly above floor level, block the doorways and crowd the halls of a traditional Japanese home; Akiko and Noriko feel bound by family strictures but desire futures of their own; a son doubts the need to merge the family business with another but also feels the pull of a new economy. And within this rubric of change, resistance, and the gradual dilapidation of traditions, another, equally vital contrast emerges between generations and between freedom and obligation. "I'm still considering whether or not I can maintain this life," Akiko tells her sister, Noriko. Later, in one of Ozu's beautifully static compositions, Akiko and Noriko kneel, realizing that the inherent sadness of change, and particularly of painful generational transition, can bring the unexpected, bittersweet beneficence of knowing where familial obligation ends and individual freedom begins.

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Phillip Lopate's quote from "Three Ozu Films From the Fifties," in Totally, Tenderly, Tragically: Essays and Criticism from a Lifelong Love Affair with the Movies (New York, 1998).

Criterion's Late Ozu box set is part of their Eclipse series, which features basic DVD sets of films by particular directors.

Tradition and Non-Tradition

As a cinephile, I come to film for various reasons, some artistic, some personal. In artistic terms, I'm primarily interested in those films that expand my understanding of the medium. I've realized recently that, in personal terms, cinema helps me evolve as well. I've never consciously turned to films for immediate identification, yet in many respects I've been unwittingly doing this all along; the reason I count the films of Resnais, Antonioni, Kieslowski, and Godard among my favorites is because they validate or expand my understanding of the world. If that sounds remotely sanctimonious, I can't help it. In the end, I'm no mere formalist or technician. If a film cannot in some way resonate with experience, I begin to wonder why it even exits.

Of late, I've been watching Asian, and primarily Chinese, films, partly to become more conversant about world cinema, and partly to familiarize myself with a culture. I have a Chinese mother and an Anglo father; the Cantonese my mother's parents spoke did not pass on to me, nor, in many respects, did their heritage, though the fault is hardly anyone's but mine. My cultural learning has been steadfastly Eurocentric, but, recently, I've used cinema to help me gravitate towards a much wider swath of the globe (namely, Asia as a whole), and the results, so far, have been fulfilling. Zhang Yimou's heavy dramas, Ozu's and Mizoguchi's quiet tragedies, Wong Kar-wai's seemingly improvisational studies of time, and Tsai Ming-liang's and Jia Zhang-ke's experimental wonders have taught me much about cinematic form, narrative, and style, while in the process they have brought me closer to an ancestral culture, even though these films don't all take place in China, and not all of these filmmakers are Chinese.

I suspect there's a valuable lesson here, about how, when it comes both to experience and cinema, one should never be entirely closed, never expect that there's no longer anything particularly revealing or transformative around the corner, beyond the bend. I once thought film stopped with Godard and Resnais; I was wrong. Their films were once important "signposts" for me, to borrow a phrase from one of my fellow travelers. But so too have been the works of these Asian filmmakers, and, in recent weeks, a new signpost has emerged in the form of Hou Hsiao-Hsien's 1998 masterpiece, Flowers of Shanghai. It is a richly drawn series of portraits of women and their lives of compromise, despair, and survival in a nineteenth-century brothel, or flower house. (Interestingly enough, this is a fairly international affair; it was Hou's first film set outside his native Taiwan and features an international Asian cast, including the Japanese actress Michiko Hada.)

The film's extremely long opening take of male patrons eating, drinking, and playing games while their flower girls look on immediately dispenses with the standard exposition of traditional narratives, as Hou eliminates back-story and linear build-up and approaches the opening scene (and the entire film) in the vein of a composer. The camera pans back and forth but nevertheless remains intent on the scene, while characters gradually leave, like instruments playing their part of a score and then dropping into silence. This particular "melody" returns, when, roughly half-way through the film, Hou introduces the same room, the same table, and the same drinking, loud conversations, and games.

Structural codas are hardly new, yet Hou's achievement here lies in his uncannily smooth, yet slow, rhythmic style. He has dispensed entirely with the cut. Each scene transitions to another solely through a dissolve, and, in several instances, Hou uses the dissolve to shift perspective and time within the same scene. Wang (Tony Leung), early in the film, sits with his former flower girl, Crimson (Michiko Hada), who is upset that he has left her for another; a dissolve occurs; then, Hou's camera presents the same room and characters from an entirely different angle. This would be a purely technical, though beautiful, device were it not wedded to a similarly rhythmic narrative technique, namely, the piecemeal, restrained illustration of the politics of this place and this culture. No man has one girl here, a master explains. And no girl has one caller.

Hou's dissolves work synchronously, and seamlessly, with his decision to frame every scene in medium wide shot, thereby emphasizing the walled interiors of the flower house and the darkened rooms and corridors, lit only by oil lamps, candles, and the matches used for opium pipes. Hou is dissolving time. Wang leaves Crimson, for example, visits Jasmin (Vicky Wei), and returns to Crimson, but how much time has passed is entirely unclear. He's also implicitly suggesting through this dissolution of time and his emphasis on interiors that the flower house is not unlike a prison; his shots serve the same purpose as the use of the term "enclave" for each madam's section of the house. These flower girls are enclosed by a patriarchal tradition that places them at the mercy of their gentlemen callers, that turns their "freedom" into something that can be bought and sold, that makes them deeply, tragically, reliant on their men. This is the tyranny of cultural tradition, portrayed in a film that is anything but traditional in its form and narrative style.

Flowers of Shanghai is also, despite its themes, a particularly beautiful film; Hou reveals much of the attractiveness of certain aspects of traditional Chinese culture, from the rhythms of language, to the objects and carefully planned decor of the flower house. The danger, though, as the flower house's affluent patrons demonstrate, is that the susceptibility to such attractions can lead to a complicity in unattractive customs and behavior. As such, Hou's style and mise-en-scene always seem to combine poignancy with beauty, particularly in the film's final sequence, when Hou's camera pans across the dark red interior of Crimson's room, underlying the process of stasis and change in traditional Chinese life and, then, appropriately, closing with Hou's choice for chronological demarcation, the dissolve, the fade to darkness.