Blossoms Shanghai, Part One: A Crowded Scroll of a City

I finally caught up with the rest of the world and finished Blossoms Shanghai. Here is the first part of my review.

Plot: more scroll than roller coaster

The story works like a modern Along the River During the Qingming Festival. It is a crowded social scroll, full of people doing business, falling in and out of favour, eating, flirting and surviving the turn of an era.

There is less melodrama than I expected. Apart from Xuezhi's death, the plot is surprisingly calm. Even the final contest between Mr Bao and Mr Qiang produces only a comme ci, comme ça level of tension.

Some set pieces are plainly engineered. The king-snake supply chain and the last-minute arrival of the master chef both carry the smell of a writer pulling a lever backstage. But a show needs a little spectacle. These devices did not annoy me. They created the slightly ridiculous feeling that I, too, had money and dinner service at stake.

The emotional web

The romantic writing is much finer than the central plot. The series takes its time with the half-defined, densely tangled connections between Mr Bao and its three principal women: Li Li, Miss Wang and Lingzi.

Women in Wong Kar-wai's work are often independent in the most interesting sense. When they decide to cut a bond, they cut it cleanly, even if the loose ends return later. Lingzi belongs to the same emotional family as Gong Er. The decision arrives hard enough to split metal and jade.

The show is not held together only by romance. Lingzi and Linghong, Taotao and Mr Bao, Yaso and Mr Bao, the loud little tribes along Jinxian Road: all of them are the coloured toppings on a cup of frozen yoghurt. The threads run out through the hands of everyone in that crowded scroll and finally disappear into the larger period.

Wong rarely gives us the broad, explanatory view. Still, I kept imagining an impossible camera rising suddenly above Night Tokyo on Jinxian Road and looking down. From 1989 to 1993, it was not only Shanghai or China that was turning over. The whole era was moving under them.

A gossip intermission

Mr Bao and Li Li

The one-night-stand probability is highest here. Their mutual attraction is mysterious and obvious. Yet the moment they cross a certain distance, an equally powerful repulsion appears. The process feels like electromagnetism running backward toward the strong interaction. This is not respectable relationship analysis, but it fits what is on screen.

Mr Bao and Miss Wang

Their relationship sits somewhere between siblings and lovers. Miss Wang has plenty of character, but the series gives her less sexual gravity. Mr Bao feels tenderness toward her without the final burst of desire that would carry them across the line.

The last shot confirms the old phrase about a lotus: admire it from a distance, but do not toy with it. There is also a pun on her name hiding in the Chinese, which the English language unfortunately refuses to rescue.

Mr Bao and Lingzi

Lingzi is insecure in love and tries to draw a safe boundary with money. Japan taught her to bow so well that something inside her bowed too. That leaves her as Mr Bao's housekeeper, manager and emotional logistics department.

My less polite reading is that a woman nearing forty is not going to erase desire simply because the man she cares about prefers gratitude. She disappears for a while, supposedly travelling around Japan. One could mischievously imagine a visit to a host club explaining how all the money vanished. Either way, she returns with the matter settled, cuts the thread and reinvents herself as the commanding figure behind a Chinese omakase restaurant.

She becomes someone. Mr Bao, for his part, offers gratitude and more gratitude, but nothing she actually wanted.

Mr Bao and Xuezhi

Xuezhi plays the long game and casts for a very large fish. Fate interrupts before the plan can finish.

She is written as a literary young woman who also loves money. Those qualities may sound contradictory when placed side by side, but both were common in that period and perfectly capable of living inside one person. Mr Bao swallows her hook so deeply that getting rid of it is no longer a matter of simply spitting it out.

What it looks like

Costume, production design, light and camera movement form the standard Wong Kar-wai combination, operating at the top tier.

What I especially like is his habit of building short passages out of what feel like selected key frames. The aesthetic is intensely Chinese and shamelessly ornate. Rapid transitions tied to music force the viewer to fill in what is missing and complete the emotional movement inside the mind. It is a kind of manipulation that leaves no fingerprints. That is top-tier skill.

What it sounds like

The Hong Kong songs, mixed with music associated with Tokyo Love Story, got me more than once.

If the show had dropped “Kimi ga Suki da to Sakebitai,” the Slam Dunk opening, into one of Mr Wei's scenes, it might have raised his entire character by a logarithm.

Performances, out of ten

Li Li: 9.5

Xin Zhilei is excellent. The makeup changes, but the deep red lips remain. Under side lighting they look especially full. Even the shadows beneath her eyes add something sensual rather than taking it away.