Roaring twenties

Day 24/63

Today we went to the Shanghai Film Park. This meant waking up early, getting the taxi to the Stadium, getting the bus to the remote location where they shoot films every day. This particular studio is one of those where you can walk on set even when they are filming and they didn’t seem too fuzzed about me taking some pictures – at least not at first.

Something that came pretty obvious during this week in Shanghai, is that where Beijing and Xi’An are both cities best known because of their thousands of years of history – Shanghai is best known for its history during the last 100 years or so. Or better yet, it’s best known of the twenties and the thirties. So where the Xi’An Film studio has the entire First Emperor’s palace recreated along with a lot of terracotta soldiers, Shanghai’s Film Studio focuses on the Nanjing Road from the twenties.

One of my favorite films, Lust Caution was filmed here. My husband also thinks that Mummy three was filmed here… And when we were walking on the twenties roads, they were filming a piece of around 200 extras stomping on the streets with some cars, machine guns and old trams. There was an ‘older’ town area, some buildings which could have been prisons but were much more likely some industrial types from the thirties, some pieces of the Bund including a church and a statue of an angel… And that’s about it. There is a European village, but really, what a European Tourist would like to see in China is not some Swiss or British looking buildings and fountains.

The local tourists (and I mean women) however, seem to come to the film park in couples, dressed in HUGE gowns, dragging their poor, bored husbands/boyfriends around the streets with a photographer, to take the pictures of themselves, pretending to be countesses or queens of the era. I might have been tempted, but thank god I will never fit a Chinese gown of any size…

We had lunch in a café that was clearly meant for foreign stars as most of its menu was pizza items. It took an hour to get served and eaten, but it didn’t really matter because our bus back was 14:30 and there really wasn’t *that* much to see. I enjoyed myself in the film park, but just because I am a film freak and I love stalking people with my camera. But just like so many things in Shanghai, it kind of left you feeling like you could have gotten something better… That it’s not exactly half as impressive as the Northern cities of China, or half as interesting as the film studio in Kyoto.