So much average

Save your money for something good and enjoyable

A great movie, one of the best of this year. There was a bit of confusion at one point in the plot, but nothing serious.

This is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a very long time. You have to go and see this on the big screen.

SPOILER insofar as final scene is mentioned.Once upon a time there was an exciting young director from China, Zhang Yimou, who dazzled us with lush colourful melodramas ("Ju Dou" and "Raise the Red Lantern"), glorious "soap", charting family travails throughout turbulent modern history ("To Live") and a type of social realism where you could almost smell the difference between countryside and city ("The Story of Qui Ju" and "Not One Less"). What became of him? He seems to have fallen victim to the seduction of the big budget martial arts genre ("Hero" and "Curse of the Golden Flower"). I could not but lament this on returning recently to one of the lesser known but nevertheless rewarding works of his earlier period, "Shanghai Triad". What he once did was often quite remarkable. Although on the surface the plot reads just like another gangster movie with feuding gangs fighting for supremacy in drug ridden 1930's Shanghai, what raises it to a higher level is that we observe and try to make sense of the nefarious goings-on through the eyes of a 14 year old boy. The opening shot just after the start of the credits is a closeup of Shuisheng who has just arrived in the city with his uncle to be placed as the servant to the mistress of their Tang relative who is "Boss" of the most powerful gangster clan around. From then on the boy is seldom away from the action which includes all sorts of murderous deeds. It's quite plain that he is just as bewildered as we are, a fact emphasised by the continual return to his closeup with those quizzical staring eyes. Much has been written about the brilliance of Gong Li's performance as Bijou, the "Boss's mistress, but for me this is the boy's film as the sense of audience identification with him is so complete. We even see his view of the world upside down in the final shots when he is trussed up and suspended from a pole as a punishment. The first half of the film set in the city moves at a furious pace, brilliant camera-work emphasising reds and the smoky atmosphere of the cabaret where Bijou performs. Thereafter the action moves to a remote river island where the main protagonists take refuge from those about to get them. Somehow this second half with its more leisurely tempo does not quite maintain the bravura of what has gone before, but who to complain after so much excitement. An imperfect work perhaps but one whose atmosphere is conveyed with superb visual imagination.

Shanghai Triad never gains momentum from a slow start and languid pacing until it eventually fizzles out.Gong Li looks superb and director Zhang Yimou's attention to detail and stylistic conceits never fail to impress. But the plot is overly simplistic and the characters never rise above a narrative bogged down with one dimensional characters and clichéd situations. You get the feeling Yimou was ready for something different in his career and Gong Li had played one too many parts under his direction.That said, it is entertaining without ever attaining the high standards of previous collaborations.

What always impresses me about Zhang Yimou's *Shanghai Triad* is how the two settings of the film -- the Thirties-era, glitzy nightclub milieu of the gangsters in Shanghai and the pastoral scene in the second half -- are used as a counterpoint to the drama unfolding before us. The settings are glamorous, mythical, beautiful; the people are not.The characters are, in fact, brutally ordinary. Even the ostensible hero of the piece, the 14-year-old boy who becomes the servant of chanteuse Gong Li, is not particularly remarkable: not intuitive, not very smart, and certainly not a winner. Ineffectual to the end, he ends up suspended upside-down like the famed Hanged Man in a deck of Tarot. The plot involving the Thirties-era Shanghai Mafia is mostly presented through the boys' eyes, with the result that the most "action-oriented" events, usually occurring off-screen, seem incoherent and, though violent and tragic, beside the point. The Boss's girlfriend Gong Li obsesses us to the same degree that she devours the boy. All else -- meaning, the plot's wider macrocosm -- remains tangential or dangerously opaque. It turns out that there is plenty enough drama in the day-to-day life of the gangster's moll, played by Gong Li with a seemingly infinite variety: shallow, slutty, heartbroken, tragic, pathetic, whimsical, tender. The poor boy is in a dither. One minute he hates her enough to spit in her tea when her back is turned; the next he smiles at her childish singing like the first fool in love in the history of the world. (By the way, let it be said that I would've had my left ear cut off if given the chance to be Li's boy-servant!)"Miss Bijou" could almost have become a real human being if permitted just a few more weeks on the island. The snotty poisons appear to ooze away from her; the rustic setting puts her back in touch with a girlish freedom, almost forgotten (and hardly suspected by us). In several of Shakespeare's plays, there exists what his critics call a "green world" -- a haven far away from the corruptions of urban life. Zhang permits us brief glimpses of decency that are engendered by this potentially healing "green world", all under the nose of the ruthless crime lord (who is ostensibly there to heal from his knife wound, as well). These glimpses are so powerfully touching that we tend to forget the Boss's evil eminence, and therefore the machinations of the gangsters -- never forgotten by THEM, of course -- intermittently slap us awake.All of which is another way of saying that Yue Lu's cinematography is almost too astonishing for the movie's subject. *Shanghai Triad* is, without question, one of the most beautiful-looking movies of the Nineties, perhaps of all time. But don't let the beauty of the pictures, or Gong Li's physical charms, for that matter, distract you from the preciseness of Zhang's direction. Obliged to commit to the idea of subjective camera placement (that is, generally taking the perspective of the boy), Zhang evinces great subtlety and restraint. For instance, he uses the Steadicam here, but doesn't get carried away with it in order to create some sort of mood or tone, the way Kubrick was prone to do. Zhang knows when to move the camera, and he knows when to keep the damn thing still: it depends on what each scene calls for. Every frame of this film is directed to a specific aesthetic purpose.By the way, this movie makes a natural double-bill with Hou Hsiao-Hsien's *Millennium Mambo*, another exercise in exquisite aesthetics with a plot about a gangster's moll. One wonders if Hou wasn't a bit tainted by the influence of *Shanghai Triad*, despite *Mambo*'s 21st-century setting. Both films are about inarticulate, helpless satellites in a criminal universe who come to depressing ends. Needless to say, these films could only have been made in China or Taiwan, home to a culture more ruthlessly realistic than our sappy civilization. If remade as an American film, the Boss in *Shanghai Triad* would have developed a sentimental attachment to the kid which would inevitably bring his criminal empire crashing down around his head. Imagine the reverse, and you'll get the idea of how THIS film ends.All in all, one of the classics of modern Chinese cinema. 9 stars out of 10.

Zhang's movies are an exquisite treat, like the experience of eating at one of those restaurants we are only privileged to visit every so often. A meal of this calibre must meet so many demands, and to enter the realm of truly memorable, must excel in all of them. Story, casting, cinematography - all of these must be properly seasoned and nuanced to create a work that is exciting and sublime.Zhang is one of the directorial masters of our age. To me the essential element of all his films is their basic humanity, drawing us into the story because though they may be set in distant times and far off places, we know the characters so well and can so readily empathize with their stories. Zhang's genius enters by placing his characters into such lush settings though with remarkably spare dialogue, like simple shavings of parmesan on rich bed of risotto.With this said, I will have done with the food analogy and give my unreserved recommendation to this piece. Many other commenters have aptly recounted the story of the bumpkin and gangster moll, so I'll spare you any spoilers.I will, however, point out some observations that demonstrate Zhang's prodigious talent. I noted the simple shot during the opening credits, where our bumpkin has just arrived in Shanghai. All we see is his face as he scans the bustling crowd of a train station, his face alone revealing so much detail without one word of dialogue or narration. He is new to the city, frightened, excited and apprehensive. It is apparent he is seeing many things taken for granted by those around him for the very first time in his life. We learn this from one wordless shot at the outset.Contrast the closing credits, where after the boy loses anyone he has grown to care about in Shanghai, he hangs suspended by his feet, seeing the world, the simpler, more honest world of his youth and his country upbringing, literally turned upside down. He is brought into the decadent and dangerous world of the Boss, where he and the other little girl will inevitably succumb to decadence or perish, if not both.Second, I love to frolic in Zhang's love for his native people, their innocence, pluck and natural good nature. Zhang is far to respectful and artful to coat his people in sentimental goo like many in the movies. (need I mention Forrest Glump?) The Road Home is a superior expression of this basic lovliness. I chuckle when I imagine that story told by Ron Howard or Mel Gibson. Ewwww.He is also keenly aware of the dangers lurking to consume and corrupt his naifs, whether it be western culture, as in Triad, indifferent communist bureaucracy, as in Qui Dou, simple rural poverty, as in Not One Less, or simply the heartlessness of selfish people around them, as in Happy Times.The cinematography in Triad is roundly wonderful, rich in color, dimension and expression. Zhang's love for the natural beauty of his native land is obviously abundant.Personally, I quickly forget I'm watching a chinese film when I watch Zhang's films, because Zhang's distillation of the human essence is so rarified that it transcends race and culture. This is the work of a confident master.