CABLE | Wong Kar-wai Colours 'Blossoms Shanghai'

"Neon signs glowed like a sea of flowers."

Jet Tone Films / Tencent Pictures

Blossoms Shanghai, Chinese auteur Wong Kar-wai's first television drama series, broadly romanticizes 1990s Shanghai in the lushly complementary vein of what his cinematic masterpiece, In the Mood for Love, did for 1960s Hong Kong but only on the small screen. Created and directed by Wong, scripted by Qin Wen, and based on author Jin Yucheng's award-winning 2013 novel, Blossoms, it tells a vaguley historical yarn of late twentieth-century Eastern capitalism wrapped in melodramatic intrigue.

Things open during the "Roaring Nineties" boom of Shanghai's economic fortunes after China's opening to global investment two decades prior, before then flashing back to the port city's modest stock market exchange origins. Blossoms uses the inherently paradoxical capitalist demands of modern authoritative Chinese society to shape its ambitious characters, led by Hu Ge as the handsome "Mr. (Ah) Bao," a successful foreign stock trader later targeted in a hit and run.

Much of Wong's direction, strongly reminiscent of his work in The Grandmaster, focuses on the contrast between the characters and their dressings. Everyone is propped up by their clothing, styling, and surroundings as an obvious but effective metaphor for the artificiality of appearances and its sense of comfort or theatre within Asian cultural business dealings. These elements enhance the underlying sense of fate and fortune that our otherwise working-class characters aspire to during the economic boom period.



An impressive but unspurprising cast of attractive actors, including three key women played by Ma Yili, Tiffany Tang, and Xin Zhilei, anchors the glossy material with the suitable amount of performative enthusiasm. Wong's camera movements, framing, and the performances he directs build his pulpy prestige drama. There's a hollow glamour to the business Blossoms ornately dramatizes with its bright neon lights, tailored outfits, and sense of burgeoning wealth. This is strongly reminiscent of The Great Gatsby in place of Wong's usual yearning aesthetic and sparely melancholic dialogue.

Through his trademark stylistic flourishes and unknowably distinct characterizations, but in a more conventional narrative package, Wong embraces the theatrical style of access to business relationships in order to flesh out his ideas of prosperity seen through the many follies of Chinese culture. Told like possibly the most glamorous East Asian soap opera ever, Blossoms Shanghai is a dazzingly artful encapsulation of late twentieth-century Shanghainese business culture, told with flair and verve to spare.

Blossoms Shanghai's thirty-episode season is available to stream weekly on The Criterion Channel.


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