Give Zhang Yimou credit for perseverance. In the ‘80s and ‘90s, the Chinese government put this filmmaker through the wringer in a way that resembles the lead character of his 1992 film The Story of Qiu Jiu and her farcical journey through bureaucratic red tape. Despite earning international acclaim, the director’s early films Red Sorghum and Raise the Red Lantern were banned or censored for criticizing Chinese politics and history. His 1994 film To Live was still banned in China by the time Shanghai Triad was released in 1995. Zhang was forbidden to attend the New York Film Festival premiere because the Chinese government objected to another film playing at the festival. If Zhang’s take on a period gangster film lacks the bitter socio-critical bent of his early work, it’s forgivable in light of the trials he’d gone through just to get his films seen in his own country.
Although Shanghai Triad shares tropes with Western crime films such as Goodfellas and The Godfather, it should not be mistaken for the director’s bid for Hollywood. (He wouldn’t get there until the Quentin Tarantino-aided release of Hero in 2002, which some feel carried a political subtext that goes against the powerful humanism evinced in his earlier work.) In a 1996 interview, Zhang insisted that because he doesn’t speak any foreign languages and isn’t well-versed in any culture other than his own, he couldn’t pander to foreign markets if he wanted to. Instead, his films consider the Chinese perspective and what audiences in his homeland will bring to his work.
Zhang, along with directors Chen Kaige and Tian Zhuangzhuang, belongs to a group of filmmakers known as the Fifth Generation, graduates of the Beijing Film Academy in the early ’80’s who put equal weight on formal and social concerns. These filmmakers were the first to emerge after the Cultural Revolution, and occupy a similar place in Chinese film history as Schlöndorff, Fassbinder, Wenders and Herzog in post-WWII Germany.
Shanghai Triad was the least pointed of Zhang’s films at the time of its release, but it’s not entirely lacking in cultural observations. Like Fassbinder, Zhang is fascinated by power structures. The protagonist is a boy from the country who, with the help of his gangster uncle, comes to Shanghai and is enlisted as a servant for Xiao Jingbao, a beautiful but demanding nightclub singer played by Zhang’s frequent collaborator and real life paramour Gong Li. The boy is under her dominion, but despite her brassy attitude, she is subservient to a powerful Triad boss. As ever, Zhang is sensitive to the repression of women, but he also shows the cycle of abuse and dehumanization traveling down the ranks, first from the Boss to Jingbao, then from Jingbao to the boy, who’s additionally chastised by his uncle when he displays resistance.
The gulf separating country life from city life is examined in the film’s second half, when the action moves to a remote island following a bloody massacre in the Boss’s house that leaves several of his gang dead. Zhang had already sketched in extraordinary detail the different ways of life across contemporary China in The Story of Qiu Jiu, following another Gong protagonist from country to district to city in search of justice. Set in the ‘30’s, Shanghai Triad reminds viewers of the longstanding nature of this disparity. Some of the film’s most moving scenes find Jingbao in conversation with a basket-maker who fears her young daughter’s affinity for this glamorous, cosmopolitan lady. Furthermore, Zhang finds the gangster genre well suited to portraying the rampant materialism of contemporary China. The film’s first half, awash in appealing gold and red tones, is set in Shanghai, mostly at the boss’s extravagant mansion. Here, too, the influence of Westerners is felt, especially in the style of dress and the presence of jazz music at the boss’s club. Gong Li’s musical numbers, glamorous costumes and preternatural beauty go a long way to create a gorgeous surface, but the brief flashes of violence that punctuate the film show what’s underneath.
The film is told through the boy’s eyes, and finally reveals itself as a story of lost innocence, and as such doesn’t resemble the conventional gangster films of Scorsese or Raoul Walsh. Much of the film’s score is an incongruously jaunty child’s theme that keeps us rooted to the boy’s perspective. The camera continually assumes his point-of-view at key moments, and the violence always happens just off-screen. The film’s final shot—along with Being John Malkovich, one of the most defeated endings in all of cinema—is taken from the boy’s point-of-view as he hangs upside-down, helpless to escape the gangsters or to stop them from taking the basket-maker’s daughter back to Shanghai.
To this day, Zhang has kept his promise to continue making films in China regardless of the censors, and some feel that the government’s recent trend of approval toward his films indicates a less radical vision. Shanghai Triad may retroactively be viewed as the director’s tentative first step toward the less reflective, more commercial films he makes today, like House of Flying Daggers and Curse of the Golden Flower. His final collaboration with Gong Li, it certainly pales next to its powerful predecessor To Live, and his masterpiece Raise the Red Lantern. But Zhang’s feel for place and compassion for his characters set him apart from mere formalists, even when his themes feel watered-down.