Now Streaming: BLOSSOMS SHANGHAI Starts Flat

Well, it's something.

Blossoms Shanghai
The first three episodes of the 30-episode series are now streaming on the Criterion Channel. Three subsequent episodes will debut weekly, every Monday at 20:00 EST.

Ten years after his last feature film, Wong Kar-Wei decided to reinvent himself as a television director. Arriving two years later in North America, his first series is prosaic rather than poetic, more intent on relating a narrative than on tapping into his established visual trademarks to evoke emotional reactions.

Because I am not versed at all in Chinese television series, I can only flail at fitting Blossoms Shanghai into proper context. Since I have watched all his films, however, and several more than once, I can say that the show, released in 2023, strikes me as entirely separate.

Whereas his short films have felt like bursts of creativity, usually not married to a strict narrative structure, Blossoms Shanghai is definitively set in Shanghai in the 1990s, a time of financial upheaval in which ambitious people were dead-set on making their fortune. As opposed to, say, Martin Scorsese's The Wolf of Wall Street or Jesse Armstrong's Succession, which also feature extended discussions of labyrinth financial deals, yet with layered portraits of the characters involved, in Blossoms Shanghai no compelling characters emerge in the first three episodes, which are dominated by cut-throat, merciless, ruthless, unappealing men and women who glare and chuckle and make mean faces and throw daggers with their eyes.

It's only three episodes, though, so I can only hope that someone will emerge who is not wholly arrogant or entirely repulsive, someone I can root for or cheer against, rather than wishing something evil upon everyone on screen.

Visually, it's a wash, since the series looks like a standard television soap opera or telenovela or a Netflix show. Your mileage may vary.

Now Streaming celebrates independent and international genre films and television shows that are newly available on legal streaming services.