Posted in: TV | Tagged: blossoms shanghai, Cannes Film Festival, jin yucheng, palme d'or, TenCent, wong kar-wai

Blossoms Shanghai: How Wong Kar Wai's First TV Series Came To Be

Blossoms Shanghai, Wong Kar Wai's first TV series, is a big hit. Let's look at what it's about - and when the world will get to see it.

Blossoms Shanghai, so far unseen in the West, is now a huge hit in China. Wong Kar Wai's first television series for Chinese television has reportedly been watched by a billion people. It has awakened interest in preserving the Shanghainese dialect, blew up tourism in the city of Shanghai, and the real-life hotel the series is set with books for the series hero's expensive suite filled up for months and interest in Shanghainese cuisine. China is in love with this series, while Wong Kar Wai's fans in the West are still begging for an English-subtitled stream to show up. We reviewed the first three episodes and will be talking about the whole series soon.

Blossoms Shanghai is an adaptation of the 2012 novel by Shanghai native Jin Yucheng and charts the lives of several characters from the 1960s to China's first economic boom of the 1990s. The novel, written in Shanghainese patois, won the Mo Dun Prize in 2015 and is considered a love letter to the city. Wong Kar Wai, who was born in the city, optioned the novel to adapt into his first television series and spent years working on the script before production began in 2019. This is where the rabbit hole begins. The novel featured three protagonists, and the original plan was to have Chinese star Hu Ge play each protagonist in a different time period. That proved too complicated, and Wong Kar Wai decided to focus on one focal character, Ah Bao, played by Hu Ge, who goes from a desperate young opportunist in the 1960s to a self-made millionaire in the 1990s with the help of his elderly mentor and the three women in his life and the people around them. The series strokes nostalgia for a time when China was booming, confident, glamorous, and prosperous while China's current economy looked shaky.

In China, Blossoms Shanghai is available in a Shanghainese audio version where the actors speak in their native dialect and a Mandarin version dubbed by the original actors with Chinese subtitles. Wong Kar Wai has reportedly read the live reactions of viewers on social media as they watched the series and will be re-editing the series according to their feedback and his notes. This means months from now, the version of Blossoms Shanghai on streaming services will be different from the current version that just went out.

Considering Blossoms Shanghai is both a seminal novel and a TV series by a world-renowned filmmaker, why isn't a version available in English? Wong Kar Wai is currently editing a feature film version he plans to premiere at major film festivals this year, probably starting with the Cannes Film Festival as the launchpad where it would be eligible for the Palme d'Or and begin a bidding war amongst distributors in the Western and Asian markets. An English translation of the novel was announced back in 2019, but I suspect its publication was held back so it could be published the same year the feature film premieres.

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