If you’re anything like me, you are still reeling, not over, and have not forgiven Hong Kong filmmaker Wong Kar-Wai for what he did with his Criterion Collection 4K boxset remasters of all his original films (he may be an auteur, one of the true grandmasters of cinema, but his aesthetic revision there is akin to a cinematic crime that rivals what George Lucas did with the “Star Wars” prequels, worse actually).
I digress. A decade after “The Grandmaster”(2013), Wong Kar Wai is finally about to return with “Blossom Shanghai,” a long-in-the-works series that is finally about to come out. Well, in China, at least, no word when we’ll ever get it here.
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Regardless, three years after it began filming, “Blossoms Shanghai” is almost here (for Asian audiences). Adapted from the novel ‘Blossoms’ by Jin Yucheng, “Blossoms Shanghai” is the first series ever directed by Wong Kar Wai.
“Blossoms Shanghai” stars Hu Ge, Ma Yili, Tiffany Tang, and Xin Zhilei and centers on the 90s-set story of a self-made millionaire in Shanghai who transforms from a young opportunist with a troubled past to the heights of the gilded city.
It’s honestly hard to keep up with release patterns in China, but The Film Stage has good intel on the rollout. It’s 30 episodes long (!!), 50 minutes each (an astounding 25 hours of new WKW, approximately), and the first four installments premiere on December 27, followed by two episodes per day on China’s Tencent Video.
No U.S. distribution has been announced, and the way U.S. television works, it would not surprise if this series never gets a proper North American release outside of, say, DVD or streaming (the idea of some TV streamer or cable company coming on board to buy those undoubtedly expensive rights vs. the return on investment seems low, frankly, though I would love to be wrong).
Wong Kar Wai previously said that “Blossoms” would be the third installment in a trilogy that began with “In The Mood For Love” and “2046,” though how that works precisely—given that those two films are original works and “Blossoms” is an unrelated adaptation—is unknown other than maybe spiritual connections about existential loneliness, perhaps?
“Jin Yucheng’s landmark novel Blossoms has been the perfect backdrop to visualize and share my love for my birth city,” Wong Kar-Wai said a few years back. “With the series, I would like to invite the audience to immerse in the intrigues of Shanghai and its inhabitants in the early 1990s, an exciting time that paved the way for the prosperity of modern Shanghai.”
As the series is just a few days away from premiering in China, a new teaser has arrived, and a full trailer is apparently just a week away. Watch the latest, plus all the most recent versions below, to refresh your memory.