On the evening of January 9th, "Flowers" officially ended, but its popularity remained unabated. Amid all the noise, Shanghai has always been the focus of conversation.
On the one hand, people have their own opinions on whether Wong Kar-wai's Shanghai pictures are authentic or not; on the other hand, the audience is talking about Yellow River Road, No. 27 on the Bund, Peace Hotel, Spare Ribs and Rice Cake, etc., which are similar to "Flowers", showing the drama. The golden Shanghai in the movie has already been recognized by the public.
Compared with documentary, Shanghai through Wong Kar-wai's lens is more like Shanghai's past from the perspective of Lao Koehler. The Bund buildings, the stock exchange and the gourmet hotels that he focuses on are integrated with the urban life and bits and pieces that he avoids, which is the real "Twin Cities" of Shanghai.
Focus on the legend of the times in Greater Shanghai
This drama adapted from the Mao Dun Literary Award-winning work of the same name has attracted much attention from the beginning. As early as 2014 at a book fair in Hong Kong, Wong Kar-wai said bluntly, "For me, "Flowers" was not love at first sight, but love at first sight," and finally decided to shoot "Flowers" with his own lens.
Until 2021, the first trailer of "Flowers" leaked. In the shot, Abao, played by Hu Ge, was wearing a suit and leather shoes, raising his glass and smiling evilly. This is where the controversy over "whether to respect the original work" arises.
Wong Kar-wai's answer is that what he photographed was "Shanghai in memory". For Wong Kar-wai, who was born in Shanghai and grew up in Hong Kong, Shanghai is an indelible "nostalgia". He once tried to remember his hometown through images. In the novel "Flowers", he retrieved memory clues from his childhood and completed his imagination of the city of Shanghai.
"In Shanghai in 1992, neon lights were eye-catching and thousands of flowers bloomed like a sea." With the tide of change in the times, Shanghai's Yellow River Road became flashing with neon lights. The vibrant market economy and wildly growing business environment attract men and women to break out of their own docks amidst the sensuality. Good things come and go, bustling with people, some people take advantage of the wind, and some people return to zero after half a day...
This is the beginning of the TV series "Flowers". Wong Kar-Wai intercepted the plot line of Po from the original novel, condensed the span of more than 30 years into the early 1990s, condensed the complicated Shanghai society into Yellow River Road, omitted the trivial details, and focused on Po's entrepreneurship and growth.
For ordinary viewers, the legendary story of ups and downs is of course more interesting to watch. But in this way, in the original novel, the vague areas of civilian urban life that the author rediscovered through detailed descriptions of the times were also abandoned and obscured in Wong Kar-wai's deletion and simplicity.
It can be said that the drama version of "Flowers" is neither completely faithful to the original novel nor purely presents the reality of Shanghai. Instead, it incorporates Wong Kar-wai's consistent extremely romantic tone, revealing the "sense of watching a fire from across the bank" and presenting another A cultural landscape about Shanghai.
Two CitiesTwo Faces of Shanghai
Shanghai, this unique oriental metropolis, has become a special image that has been described and constructed since the late Qing Dynasty.
Texts such as "Biographies of Shanghai Flowers" in the late Qing Dynasty and the early Republic of China concentrated on the great changes brought about by social changes in Shanghai. Among them, the high development of the concession and the backward situation of the Chinese community formed a "twin city" narrative of Shanghai as two cities coexisting, creating the legendary nature of the Shanghai story in the late Qing Dynasty, and also triggered thinking about Shanghai's modernity.
After the Revolution of 1911, the dual spaces of Huazhu accelerated their mutual penetration. In the best-selling novel "Magic City" he wrote when he visited Shanghai in 1923, the Japanese writer Matsuo Feng who lived in Shanghai in the early 20th century used the word "Magic City" to refer to Shanghai. This was precisely based on the existence of Shanghai's concessions. The coexistence state of two spaces with different properties formed.
At the same time, with the development of Shanghai's modernity and the formation of Shanghainese self-identity, modern Chinese writers have examined Shanghai, the oriental metropolis, in a unique way, using a strange modern perspective to express the charm of the city and its people.From the Mandarin Duck and Butterfly School to the New Sensation School, the city's complex landscape colors and the noisy and hurried pace of urban life have been repeatedly exaggerated. Shanghai has shaped its own face in the social and cultural fields - a symbol of hope for the future and modernity. The other is the chaos and corruption of the past.
After the founding of New China, Shanghai was gradually submerged in the overall narrative of the Republic. Until recent decades, with the pace of reform, economic leaps, bright neon lights, opportunities, wealth and hedonism have grown simultaneously everywhere.
also represents Shanghai in the 1990s. In movies and TV dramas such as "Stock Madness" and "Debt", the kind of small citizen life in which five people crowded into a room and accused each other of neighbors of stealing water and electricity in the public kitchen is very similar to the drama. The prosperous scene and peach blossoms in this version of "Flowers" constitute a two-city narrative of this era. This is why so many Shanghai audiences feel an incompatible sense of separation from Wong Kar-wai's Shanghai imagination.
"Flowers" has come to an end, and the imagination about Shanghai will not stop. It is a place for strivers to pursue their dreams, a daily life for Shanghai citizens, a paradise for consumerism, a “coffee market” that accompanies pseudo-bourgeois, and a place where generations remember the mountains and rivers.
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