Through these unconventional devices to the gangster genre, Zhang Yimou imbues the film with a unique and eloquent expression about expectation and reality, appearance and truth, the infinity of moral darkness and its corrosive reach. These eternal themes of the human condition are presented in a well-paced narrative revealing once more the director's gift for telling a story. In exploring the complexity of reality, a great film often invites different interpretations of its meanings and allusions. Shanghai Triad is such a film. Shanghai today, like sixty years ago, is very materialistic.
People are money-obsessed, are losing their morality.
So the film, as well as a period piece, is a warning or critique for present society. In any event, Shanghai Triad is less a story about underworld intrigue than an exposition of ordinary people trapped in the machinery of evil. Shanghai while the second part takes place in the simplicity of a rural island landscape often shot in the muted light of dawn or dusk. The events of the film occur over a span of seven days. In the first scene, the viewer, like Shuisheng, experiences the bustling confusion of a strange city as faceless bodies scurry around him at the harbour front.