Last week, after nearly three years of filming, Wong Kar-wai’s “Blossoms” premiered in China. The series is a whopping 30 episodes, around 50 minutes each — this totals to 25 hours of television.
This is good news for WKW fans, but there’s still no U.S. distribution for “Blossoms,” and I am wondering which streamer would actually be willing to handle such an ambitious project — maybe MUBI?
Regardless, programmer/distributor/writer Frank Yan actually managed to watch 18 episodes of “Blossoms,” he, mostly, liked what he saw and posted his review on X:
Now with 18 episodes in, I can firmly say that Blossom Shanghai is a very good TV show coming from Wong Kar-Wai. It’s a spiritual sequel to the Grandmaster in the sense that it’s trying to evoke the entrepreneurial era of Shanghai in the early days of China’s economic reform.
Yes WKW has to compromise a lot of his sensualism in order to make a 30-episode business drama, yet the visual style is unmistakably WKW. And whenever the show centers around the relationship between men and women (especially in episodes 13 & 14), you’ll find he still got it.
I really hope he’ll get William Chang (who’s not credited anywhere in the show) to re-edit it into a film (also change some of the obvious ripoff music) which I think has the potential to become another Wong Kar Wai classic
All that being said, if you expect this to be what Twin Peaks: the Return was to David Lynch, you’ll definitely be disappointed.
When it was first announced, five years ago, “Blossoms” was supposed to be WKW’s next film, but it then turned into a TV series. This is an adaptation of Jin Yuchen’s novel of the same name which follows the lives of Shanghai residents from the end of China’s Cultural Revolution, in the early ‘60s, through the end of the 20th century.