The night before Cannes' 2015 Main Competition lineup was announced, I watched GOODBYE SOUTH, GOODBYE for the first time. Call it a hunch, call it an omen, but I was close to certain we'd finally see Hou Hsiao-Hsien's THE ASSASSIN emerge this year. I felt some sort of tribute was in order, and it had been too long since my last Hou experience. If I'd been less excitable, rudimentary research might well have confirmed my suspicion for me ahead of time. But who wants to prove Santa Claus isn't real? The next day, it was Christmas. I suspect THE ASSASSIN will easily be this year's heavyweight, though I'm very excited for Jia's and Apichatpong's entries, the latter of which was uncertain until a day or two ago. It's been 2 years since Jia's newest feature film and 5 since Apichatpong's. Hou, though, wins out at a full 8 years of absence. He hasn't been inactive, but it seems we're a long way from the 80s and 90s, where Hou seemed indefatigable in his output. THE ASSASSIN has loomed large in the aging auteur's path, absorbing year after year in which another two or three films might have emerged. With Hou, it's hard not to be greedy! By all accounts THE ASSASSIN was a challenging shoot, and I expect we'll see the proof in motion very soon. Now, anxious horizon-scanning no longer necessary, I feel free to fully appreciate what we already have.
With my love for THREE TIMES (viewed beautifully, appropriately, in a skyscraper in Japan) and warm fondness toward FLIGHT OF THE RED BALLOON, it's been a lovely couple of weeks exploring Hou's older films. I've been missing the experience of getting to know a great auteur, as I've already exhausted a fair few impressive filmographies. I enjoyed the drifting GOODBYE SOUTH, GOODBYE quite a lot as my first reacquaintance with Hou. There is a sense of despair in it echoing more softly than in the film I'm about to discuss, but that subtle unease unexpectedly lifts every now and then to euphoric results, as in the mountainside motorcycle trip and that orange-tinted entrance to a party. GOOD MEN, GOOD WOMEN situated me deeper in Hou's stake in history, even if it is the least of the films I've seen so far. THE PUPPETMASTER is so intricate and reserved that I will need some time before consolidating my experience of it into an opinion. Still, it's an exceedingly impressive film. Even as I've left most of Hou's earlier, smaller-scale films untouched (not entirely by choice; few are available to me at this point in time), his mid-to-late period films have warmed me back to the hope that there are still cinematic surprises and delights in the world yet to come.
At the apex, so far, comes FLOWERS IN SHANGAI. My current favorite, it's one of those films you can't help imagine being made for you, melding perfectly into sensibilities you suspect few others share. I love this film, and I feel lucky to have seen it. For this experience, I must unexpectedly thank YouTube, of all sources. Yes, Hou Hsiao-Hsien's FLOWERS OF SHANGHAI is on YouTube, and it is available at reasonable quality, with English subtitles. Or it was, until recently. A recent check confirms that it's been snatched away. What a shame. No matter. I have found YouTube to be a helpful resource lately, after first discovering Manoel de Oliveira's MON CAS there days after its maker's death. The aforementioned GOODBYE SOUTH, GOODBYE is also on Youtube, and just for good measure, here is Anh Hung Tran's THE VERTICAL RAY OF THE SUN. As you may suspect, I am impressed with such a proliferation of "rare" films, especially in contrast to the hegemony of Netflix. I have only just received a disc of Hou's GOOD MEN, GOOD WOMEN from Netflix, its "Very Long Wait" status being the ostensible reason for such a delay.
I somewhat doubted I would receive the film at all. Netflix seems content to spirit away whichever films it pleases, evidenced most ludicrously by David Cronenberg's CRASH now being unavailable for rental. It is not my intention to bog down this post on Hou's superlative film with an anti-Netflix polemic, but I do think there is a point here worth making. I am admittedly not familiar with the workings of DVD distribution, and I know that, for example, Nicholas Ray's IN A LONELY PLACE has gone out-of-print, thus accounting for its unavailability on Netflix. It is possible that such mundanity explains the placement of 56 other films in my Queue's Saved section. Still, I can't imagine what is causing the "Very Long Wait" behind FRIENDS WITH MONEY, a Sony Pictures Classics film starring Jennifer Aniston, as well as my (presumptive) next delivery. To focus on the logistics ignores the climate of forced scarcity that Netflix helps maintain. There are, of course, always power differentials affecting which films are deemed profitable enough for production, let alone global distribution via home media. However, it is precisely the least accessible films which suffer the most from the supposed "invisible hand" of the market. The corporate curation of Netflix withholds as much as it provides, its relative abundance the necessary corollary to the many films it deems too uncommercial. Now that YouTube's hidden library of foreign and independent films has emerged as an alternative to these artificial holes, I plan to use it as often as needed to supplement Netflix's paltry offerings. Without YouTube, FLOWERS OF SHANGHAI would remain an "Unknown" to me.
Anyhow, onward to the film. FLOWERS OF SHANGHAI illustrates a particular sadness that is well-known to me but hard to articulate through art, if my many years of not finding it there are any indicator. It's the sadness of rueful and uncomprehending self-destruction, set against a world unconcerned with interfering in any way. In that sense, I doubt it's a coincidence that the film is set entirely within opium dens. Drugs, as a whole, seem uniquely able to spin a sense of internal worthlessness into rituals of self-harm. There's a great distance between this belief of mine and puritanical Reaganite sternness, so don't get too offended. Drugs have their own unique effects on the mind and body, but I'd hardly be the first to claim a given activity is an opiate (aha!) to the masses. Religion, television, the usual suspects, all of which have been argued long before this day today. Not to be snide, of course, because I think it's a great big deal to acknowledge that people seem to have a dark flair for self-destruction, and it pays to recognize those tendencies, if they exist, in yourself, and in others. Drugs and their users are a metaphor for this fear/tendency as much as an actualization. The drug addict is only the most visible and stigmatized of people who can't make sense of their place in the world. Neither a false sense of superiority nor a rigid aversion to drugs can keep away the existential dread so literalized by drug abuse. Despair, loneliness, and isolation pervade.
Which, to come around finally, is I think what Hou is getting at in FLOWERS OF SHANGHAI. If I have to bend over backward to explicate the non-judgmental stance of the film, it's mostly because I think that its hazy sadness is best experienced direct, undiluted. Opium is a stranger to me, but the feelings it's meant to ward away are not. Therefore, I can follow its users every step of the way up until the high itself, at which point I can substitute some other equivalent feeling. I love this film, and I would hate to get tangled up in any preconceptions I'd brought to it. Perhaps speculating on the presence or absence judgment is something only Westerners need to do, as Hou seems to have jumped right into his milieu without reservation. But I'm less interested in unpacking the judgmental Western mindset than I am in the difficult feelings that judgment, as a critical approach, is meant to obfuscate. So, if we can take for granted the existence of judgment, Western or otherwise, let's agree to ignore it and look more closely at what judgment effectively hides.
In Hou's Shanghai, when even the tumultuous 20th century was still a distant future, the world exists in miniature within the confines of brothels. Men parade their wealth and cluster together to drink and gamble, women occupying as much of their attention as they see fit. Which is ironic, since the economics of running those comforting hideaways seem shouldered entirely by the female owners and prostitutes. The courtesans, far from world-weary, come across as impulsive and naive. Susceptible to the fickle affections of male visitors, they fight and wage rebellion against their "Aunties." In turn, the Aunties are quick to remind their employees of their financial dependence. There is a constant feeling of insecurity in FLOWERS OF SHANGHAI: employer and employee cannot trust one another, nor can customer and provider. When bad feelings erupt, as they always seem to, inequality gives the edge to the more financially secure. The many inhabitants of the brothel coexist in a narcotic lull when times are good, but equilibrium is always destabilized by unruly emotion, and no one is prepared to deal with confronting the resultant power imbalances face-to-face.
Really, I'm spelling out the themes and throughlines more than Hou ever does. And even those aren't what hit me hardest, necessary as they are. Hou Hsiao-Hsien, like many artists I consider great, can reliably sketch out the sources and effects of power through a variety of metaphors and environments. A 21st-century Taiwanese nightclub is just as fertile ground for him as the aftermath of World War II. I'm quite in thrall to his skill and adaptability. But it's the emotions he teases out from the forces of history that stay with me most. Ultimately, a movie like FLOWERS OF SHANGHAI tells me about myself, with a clarity greater than I myself might be able to summon. As much as it is a story about China and its people, it is also a story of days wasted in social diffusion, of pleasant times forcefully repressing bad memories. Of codependence and the emotional inscrutability of all people. The inability to see or understand yourself clearly. The horror of realizing that no one else can help or explain themselves to you any better. Is this why I seek refuge in art? Because artists spend years constructing something so beautiful and affecting, itself synthesized from years of inchoate personal experience? The emotions art can create in me, and the passion poured into it by people I don't know, is a form of intimacy. Art is a performance and an endeavor, undertaken by sensitive and creative people the world over. I am the spectator. Film is a recording, sight sound and sensation, which I can return to at my leisure, from a safe remove, in a safe place. The world is out there around me, but emotion is inside me, and I bring myself to art in times of need so that I can commune with something that makes more sense than I do to myself. Art is a substitute, a distraction in some ways but a vitally important one in others. There's always a dialectic at work, between me finding what I need in art and turning away from the real, harder work of putting myself into the world.
Viewed through my own personal context, it's no surprise to me that one of my favorite films is IN THE MOOD FOR LOVE. Quite apart from its mood of aching melancholy, which it shares with FLOWERS OF SHANGHAI, it is an ornament of despair on which I can ruminate from afar. Most likely it's not a coincidence that both films share a cinematographer. And both were made by citizens of Chinese territories prone to disruption and uncertainty. The connections are there, even as they spiral quickly out of firm meaning. I suspect it would be foolish to attempt any deeper reading of my unexpected connection to Chinese-language post-colonial cinema. In any event, I have memories of both films now, the gut-level sense of recognition in its characters and situations, and each subsequent revisit will bring those memories to surface. I have seen IN THE MOOD FOR LOVE many times over many years. Only now am I seeing in FLOWERS OF SHANGHAI what I'd turned to IN THE MOOD FOR LOVE for previously. With these two similar films, I can see more clearly what moves me most in art, and with that insight I can turn my gaze inward to remind myself that movies crystallize for me an understanding of the world that is uniquely my own, but shared enough by others that I can rely on their perceptions to augment mine. In sum: I am no longer so alone, so lonely, so crushed by social forces that serve to isolate me from other people. But in the worlds of these films, I see the damage that was done to me, how it was both self-generated and imposed from outside. They come together and alchemically reflect something always and already beyond my grasp. Their national origins, the remote eras in which they take place, and the kinds of people they depict all somehow overlap to create, improbably, an image of my inner self. A deeply strange process, but after all, it's the possibility of such an unlikely connection that drives us to art in the first place.
If this essay ends up not being very much about FLOWERS OF SHANGHAI at all, I hope I've communicated that the film has brought me outside of myself, to take a closer look at who I am and what brought me to appreciating a movie like this so deeply. There will be many other times when I can admire its craft and its beauty. It's certainly not a film I'm planning to forget, so I will be gladly reconsidering it often in the future. I could offer a wealth of observations about its mournful color scheme, that liltingly sad violin that drifts subliminally through most scenes, and Hou's famously intricate long takes that somehow feel unprecedented in the history of cinema. And what about the characters, who embody their own caprices and react to those of others so precisely? Frankly, I'm not even sure I'm equal to the task of capturing the deathly malice Tony Leung casts over the film, let alone the excruciatingly sad acts of defiance by the film's many actresses. A whole essay deserves to be written just on Hou's beautifully sorrowful treatment of the unrealized hopes of women with nowhere to go and no one to count on. Today's not the day, though. I'm tired and I've said enough for now. There will be more to say later.
