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Blossoms Shanghai: Wong Kar Wai's Epic TV Series Premiering Soon

Wong Kar Wai's series Blossoms Shanghai is premiering on the Criterion Channel beginning November 24th. Here's why you need to check it out...

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Article Summary

  • Wong Kar Wai’s Blossoms Shanghai premieres November 24 on the Criterion Channel, with three episodes weekly.
  • The series adapts Jin Yucheng’s award-winning novel about ambition and desire in 1990s Shanghai.
  • Blossoms Shanghai blends Wong Kar Wai’s signature romantic style with a sweeping cast and stunning visuals.
  • Though visually dazzling, the series struggles with pacing and lacks the dramatic tension of Wong’s acclaimed films.

At last, Wong Kar Wai's epic 30-episode TV series Blossoms Shanghai is premiering on the Criterion Channel later this November.  Adapted from Jin Yucheng's award-winning novel about 1990s Shanghai, fortunes are waiting to be made—but not everyone can be a winner. In his first-ever television series, legendary director Wong Kar Wai (In the Mood for Love) orchestrates a sprawling cast of stockbrokers, entrepreneurs, restaurateurs, bureaucrats, schemers, and dreamers riding the wave of market reform in the wake of the Shanghai Stock Exchange's historic reopening. At the center is the daring self-made trader Ah Bao (Hu Ge), whose increasingly risky business maneuvers intertwine his fate with those of three women, each with her own ambitions. Luxuriating in Shanghai's food, fashion, and language, Wong delivers an exuberant love letter to his birthplace. A massively popular hit in China, Blossoms Shanghai is an intoxicating epic tinged with Wong's signature romanticism.

Blossoms Shanghai: Wong Kar Wai's Epic TV Series Premieres Soon
Criterion Channel

Making Blossoms Shanghai was personal to Wong Kar Wai, who released a video to introduce the series.

All of Wong Kar Wai's cinematic tricks and techniques are on display in Blossoms Shanghai: the dreamy camerawork, drifting in and out of staggered slow motion and elliptical editing, the waltz-like music, and the close-ups of clocks, which create a dreamlike vision of lost time. The series aims to celebrate Shanghai in all its cultural glory: the food, the narcissistic, emotionally distant man whose unavailability drives women to heartbreak and destruction. The problem is, without any unrequited romance or thwarted desire, the cinematic tricks don't sing. With so many episodes, the series plods along, offering plenty of atmosphere, but lacks any real plot and technical tricks that don't quite sing. It just plods along very prettily when it should sing like Wong Kar Wai's best movies, especially In the Mood for Love, on which his reputation rests in the West.

Starting on November 24, three new episodes of Blossoms Shanghai will be released on the Criterion Channel every Monday night at 8 pm ET through the end of January. 

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Adi TantimedhAbout Adi Tantimedh

Adi Tantimedh is a filmmaker, screenwriter and novelist. He wrote radio plays for the BBC Radio, “JLA: Age of Wonder” for DC Comics, “Blackshirt” for Moonstone Books, and “La Muse” for Big Head Press. Most recently, he wrote “Her Nightly Embrace”, “Her Beautiful Monster” and “Her Fugitive Heart”, a trilogy of novels featuring a British-Indian private eye published by Atria Books, a division Simon & Schuster.
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