Glamorous and empty, just like its subjects

I feel like the human spirit almost completely disappeared into the opium smoke in this one, and I think that's Hou's and screenwriter Chu's intention, telling of a kind of fin-de-siecle decadence that mirrored their feelings about Taiwan and the world in the late 90s. Pretty, but ultimately vacuous and bleak, riddled with decay and death, perverse on the inside. (The preceding 'Goodbye South, Goodbye' and succeeding 'Millenium Mambo' are in the same vein.) It's a somewhat one-sided and curmudgeonly lamentous philosophical view of things, in my opinion.

It's interesting the writer Eileen Chang originally translated Han Bangqing's novel from Wu into Mandarin because she was attracted precisely to the grand realism of the everyday human dynamics and stories in the book, to its profound warmth, especially in the foibles and failings of its characters. Here that's all but vanished, and we're left with a pretty surface, a scintillating exterior like a Faberge egg, with a void inside. Warmth in the film becomes stuffiness, smoke, suffocation, dark claustrophobic paranoia. It's cynical (but cynicism is simply the flipside of naivite), and I suspect it's more Chu's doing than Hou's. Hou's earlier films weren't like this; it's only when Chu became the sole writer (after co-writer Wu Nien-jen's departure after GSG) that Hou's movies became more and more self-gazing and decadent/indulgent.

Which makes me wonder, what would another director (eg Edward Yang) have done with the same exact material?