Posted in: TV | Tagged: blossoms shanghai, wong kar-wai

Blossoms Shanghai: Wong Kar-Wai Series Coming to Criterion Channel

Wong Kar-Wai announced that his 30-episode television series Blossoms Shanghai is set to make its Western debut on the Criterion Channel.

The wait is over – Wong Kar-Wai's 30-episode TV series Blossoms Shanghai will be streaming on the Criterion Channel later this year. The director released a video on the Criterion Channel's YouTube, officially announcing the news himself. The series, adapted from the award-winning novel by Jin Yucheng, was originally streamed and broadcast in China in early 2024 and became a massive hit, reigniting interest in Shanghai the city, its unique culture, the dialect, and the food as well as a look at the start of China's first economic boom years in the 1990s that changed the country and moved it towards what it is now.

Blossoms Shanghai was a big deal in China, a glamorous celebration of 1990s Shanghai during China's first big economic boom. It is also the first major television series produced and directed by Wong Kar Wai. That makes it more than just any C-drama series. Wong Kar Wai is not a journeyman director who just points the camera at actors' overlit faces, waits for them to deliver their lines, and then gets it over with. It has the most beautiful images on any TV series anywhere, every shot, every prop, every piece of clothing, every light, every angle was meticulously planned. It took three years to film the series, which meant keeping the standing sets, including that massive street lot recreating Shanghai, dressed and prepped for that whole time. You could write a whole book about how Blossoms Shanghai was molded into a Wong Kar Wai project. All his common tricks, tropes, and tools are present in the thirty-episode series.

Any new project by Wong Kar-Wai is considered a major event after In The Mood for Love made him an international household name, even though several of his other films before it also had a huge impact on world cinema. Chungking Express defined filmmaking in the late 1990s when every second movie aped its staccato slow-motion style. I watched Blossoms Shanghai in 2024 without English subtitles, and found it an unfinished text in the way all Wong's movies tend to be. It's entirely possible that he has re-cut the series for its international streaming debut, which is due later this year, since he's been known to have different cuts of his projects.

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