Wong Kar-Wai's 'Succession'

Wong Kar-Wai hadn't directed a feature film since The Grandmaster (2013), his lavish homage to Bruce Lee's martial arts master. That same year, he acquired the rights to Blossoms , a novel by Jin Yucheng that has not been translated into Spanish but is famous for its use of Shanghainese, the dialect native to the city where Wong was born sixty-six years ago. The filmmaker didn't begin shooting until seven years later, in Shanghai, where he reconstructed Huanghe Street as it shone in the 1980s and 1990s, a neon-lit festival worthy of the Las Vegas strip. According to the series Blossoms Shanghai , its luxury restaurants were the favorite place to close important deals since the reopening of the Shanghai Stock Exchange, the most important stock market in China.

⁄ 'Blossoms Shanghai' focuses on the world of money, success culture and power struggles

This thirty-episode, forty-five-minute series begins at this key moment in China's recent history, with the first half now being released on Filmin (the first five on June 17), when the protagonist, Ah Bao – played by Hu Ge (starring in Diao Yinan's neo-noir Wild Goose Lake ), a young businessman, is run over in front of one of these restaurants and the briefcase full of bills he was carrying flies into the air. In addition to the theme centered on capital, the culture of success and power struggles, the soundtrack by Frankie Chan (a former collaborator who also scored Fallen Angels , Chungking Express and Ashes to Ashes Redux in the nineties) is strongly reminiscent of Nicholas Britell's for Succession . We might also think of Coppola's Megalopolis , with its certain excessiveness, the abundance of golden tones, and the art deco architecture of some iconic buildings, such as the Peace Hotel, built in the 1920s by the Sassoon family, where Bao sets up his headquarters following the instructions of his mentor, Uncle Ye (Benchang You, a bit like Tony Leblanc in his later years). But Blossoms Shanghai is, fundamentally and eminently, a Chinese series.

Wong Kar-Wai himself presented it a few years ago as the culmination of a trilogy completed by In the Mood for Love (2000) and 2046 (2004), a selling point that is already disconcerting given that we assumed that those two films already formed a trilogy with Days of Being Wild (1990). That approach is not the best preparation for the series either. Not only because neither Tony Leung nor the now-retired Maggie Cheung appear, but because, although the image is pure precious baroque in the Wong style – with its captivating documentary moments – the narrative is more typical of a traditional Chinese soap opera, with its use and abuse of popular humor that may disconcert those who come looking for another In the Mood for Love , where the local coloring was limited to the small world of that landlady who was fond of mahjong.

While the somewhat grotesque laughs may seem out of place to Western viewers, they undoubtedly contributed to the warm reception Wong's first series had in China. Once the humorous culture shock is overcome, the series emerges as a grand ode to his hometown, where Bao plays the role of a noble yuppie dressed in Armani (there's plenty of product placement , from Estée Lauder to KFC) who deserves applause when he succeeds with a T-shirt business. Gentleman, a reclusive Tony Leung, it's true, moves between three women with whom he also has no tangible relationship: one cooks him congee in a small restaurant she finances to keep him supplied; another is a civil servant practically in charge of the government office that certifies all export businesses; and the third runs El Gran Lisboa, the new restaurant on Huanghe Street.

⁄ The director blends his precious baroque style with the narrative of a traditional Chinese soap opera

Like all series, it requires a degree of patience, but after the first fifteen episodes, which are the ones we've seen so far, it's clear that Wong hasn't lost his ability to dazzle us. It will even particularly please the audience that always criticized him for being so lacking in narrative, at least in a conventional sense. The opposite is true here.