Millennium Mambo

I really loved this movie. Many people didn't and I really understand why : it's a very slow movie. Everything takes time, everything is long and you don't really see where the director really wants to go. He follows this girl. She appears to us at the beginning at the film, walking in a very long corridor, in a slow motion and on pop music. As this girl is impersonated by Shu Qi, she is absolutely beautiful. This girl smokes, she seems a little bit sad and you don't really know what is her story. The voice of a girl tells you about the relationships this girl had in the past and this voice says that, when she speaks, it's in 2010 (ten years later after when the action takes place). You never really understand why this voice says that. You never really understand what this girl wants and what is her past (although you have some informations during the film), you just see her live and it's absolutely fascinating and hypnotic. It's hard to say but you see how much Hou Hsia Hsien is fascinated by beauty, time and modern life. His fascination for time is also present in "Three Times". In this movie, everything is normal, nothing is spectacular and incredible (about the plot, the sets or whatever) but everything is poetic, mysterious and hypnotic. It's the kind of feeling you have when you see someone and you don't know why, but this person fascinates you. It's the same kind of feeling. It's fascinating as when you see someone's life and just let this person free to do what she wants, you just look at this person. It's a very good movie although fascination is something very personal.

The opening scene in which Vicky runs in slow motion accompanied by some fine techno music is amazing. This scene haunts me to the present day (and I've seen the film in 2001) and is in my opinion just visually/technically stunning. Also the colours which Hou Hsiao-hsien captures are amazing, eye candy. I've seen the Film at a film festival and liked it a lot. It may seem boring to some people because there seems to be no real given story (with twists and turns to be expected). But the slow development of the story depicts real life and pulls one deeper into the movie.

Also I wanted to note that the film is also known as "chie shi manpo" - millennium mambo.

A hollow life is observed clinically but sympathetically in this melancholy, graceful film, which is itself hollow but compelling, like the dance beat it is set to. The director uses a convention I hadn't seen since early silent films: a summary description of an action, followed by its acting out. Also, the story is narrated from a time yet to come. These devices create the sense that the events have happened before--as they have, in the cyclical, purposeless life we are witnessing--and also that they are inevitable. The story is narrated in the voice of the leading character, but in the third person: an older self from a real future? or an alternate reality? or only her imagination? The narration is necessary as a comment on the characters' behavior because in the numb and mindless hedonism that draws them in and keeps drawing them (she keeps leaving the boyfriend who embodies this life style but keeps returning to him) they are never shown as capable of thought. Whether the film means to say that, or is simply limiting its view and depth of field to exclude their thoughts as peripheral to their lives, this lack works to unconvince us. The characters are shown in attitudes of thought but never speak anything like a thought, even a stupid one; they are moved entirely by want and impulse. The hedonist boyfriend is shown as having friends; how? Nobody not brain-dead exists in a state of pure mindlessness. That is the view of parents whose adolescent refuses to talk to them: who can understand these kids? This film describes a life--and this is an interesting accomplishment, but a relatively narrow one. More difficult, in this milieu, and ultimately more interesting would have been to discover the person whose life it is (or will have been).

In a revealing interview included on the DVD, Hou Hsiao Hsien says he wanted "Millennium Mambo" to be a picture of Taipei night life and also "much more," a "multifaceted" film with "multiple points of view" that he would have liked to make six hours long; something post-modern and deconstructed and free-form and improvised, but "modernist" too in some aspects.

The actual film isn't so much multifaceted or plot less as it is a portrait in the moment of a few people composed, with a voice-over from ten years later, from the point of view of a pretty middle-class girl called Vicky (The bee-sting-lipped, doe-eyed Qi Shu, who also stars in the present-day chapter of Hou's recent "Three Times") who's stuck in a dysfunctional relationship with a spoiled, also pretty, middle-class boy, the bleached-haired Hao Hao (Chun-hao Tuan), who does drugs and hits on Vicky when she least wants to be hit on and who won't work and, as Vicky's omnipresent voice-over tells us, at one point has stolen his dad's Rolex and pawned it for a lot of money. They live together and hang out at clubs and Vicky works at a bar as a "hostess," a euphemism for a lap dancer who does drugs and drinks with customers and probably has sex with them -- like Liang Ching (Annie Shizuka Inoh) the actress-narrator of Hou's 1995 "Good Men, Good Women." Vicky's bar job gets her involved with an older gangsterish man named Jack (Jack Kao, the actress Liang Ching's dead lover in "Good Men").

"Millennium "Mambo" doesn't show us Taipei nightlife in any collective or panoramic sense. It shows us -- a few times -- the hazy corners of a few bright clubs with little crowds of attractive young people playing games and doing drugs and alcohol, and it shows us -- many times -- corners of the apartment where Vicky and Hao Hao live, and bits of a mountain town in Hokkaido, Japan where Vicky goes, invited initially by a couple of boys she meets.

Atypically for Hou, the camera moves around quite a bit too in this film, following the people and hugging their faces and bodies -- but also lingering, in his old style, statically observing doorways, walls, light fixtures, or windows with a train going by outside. Many cigarettes are lit, many are smoked. Meth is puffed in a pipe. Hao Hao pouts. Vicky looks sad or angry. The couple break up, but Vicky comes back, or Hao Hao comes after her. It's approach/avoidance: he tells her she's from another planet, but he keeps getting her back. Jack is an oasis for Vicky; but at a crucial time in winter when she goes to Japan, he isn't available, leaving her a key and a cell phone, to wander the streets. She lies in bed. She stares out the window. In a long outtake on the DVD about her Japan sojourn, Jack actually calls her and she's got a cold. In the final cut, he never calls, and she remains healthy. What's left isn't much, though as always for Hou and for many Chinese directors, the visuals are lush and beautifully lit, even if the frames are empty and the plot line, though never absent as his interview promises, goes nowhere. "Millennium Mambo's" reference to the end of the millennium (and perhaps changes in China and Hongkong?) seems, like the six-hour movie and the portrait of Taipei nightlife Hou promises in his interview, to have come to us as little more than the pretty but empty fragments of a vague, lost intention. This is a remake of Antonioni's "L'Avventura," in winter, with young attractive Asians -- and Qi Shu as the new Monica Vitti -- but without the world-weariness or awareness of any sort of fading cultural heritage, and with, instead of Antonioni's haunting white noise, a nagging techno score.

The mood in which I left after viewing Millennium Mambo was a heavy sort of depression. I felt as if I had experienced, or re-experienced through memory, events causing one to give in to hopelessness; to accept being dominated by another. In retrospect, Vicky describes this period of time as being hypnotized or under a spell. Hou Hsiao-hsien is successful in casting that spell on his audience. Three aspects of the film lend to this success: the non-sequential unfolding of events, the use of long-takes from a more or less distant perspective, and the sound track. One of the first glimpses into Vicky¡¯s life with Ah Hao is at a time in their relationship when she has already given up. From here we are taken further back to various points in their relationship. There is no story per se, she is simply caught in this cycle of him finding her and her leaving, yet we do learn how she ended up in this cycle. There was a time when she resisted his advances, when she scolded his dangerous drug use, a time before she felt trapped. Knowing the end result of their relationship maintains a sense of hopelessness throughout the film. It is this constant sense of hopelessness, with no comic relief or side story to lift the weight of the mood, that causes the audience to experience the spell she is remembering. ¡°Cold, and colder, that was what I demanded of my camera¡± When I read this quote I immediately recalled the scene I mentioned above, when Vicky endures Ah Hao¡¯s advances, sexual or otherwise, annoyed, but in complete submission and as a matter of routine. The camera follows him to the floor, straining to see through the table obstructing the view but not getting any closer. While this may have been a mixture of ¡°pathos and eros¡± as Ah Hao smelled her body for the scent of other men it was indeed a disturbing violation that the camera forced the audience to participate in by calmly looking on. Other long-takes, showing two or more simultaneous independent actions, helped to invoke her sense of loneliness and the monotony of her life as the minutes dragged. Thirdly, the soundtrack, with its hypnotic beat and mix of high-pitched, eerie sounds, matched the repetition of events played out on the screen. He was the DJ, controlling the sounds added over the same, never-ending rhythm. This is what she lived with, day in and day out. Even as she is walking alone over the bridge, the same music is playing in her head.