Director: Hsiao-Hsien Hou
Writer: T'ien-wen Chu
Photography: Ping Bin Lee
Music: Yoshihiro Hanno, Kai-yu Huang, Giong Lim
Editors: Ju-kuan Hsiao, Ching-Sung Liao
Cast: Shu Qi, Chun-hao Tuan, Jack Kao, Jun Takeuchi, Ko Takeuchi, Doze Niu, Pauline Chan, Rio Peng
This confusing but beautiful and often striking picture is the first I’ve seen by Taiwanese director Hsiao-Hsien Hou. My points to follow may thus (actually, as always) say more about me than the movie or any of its principals. It was released in 2001, and it is set in 2001 (perhaps to avoid arguments about which millennium the year 2000 belongs to), but the premise is that the events are memories of the main character, Vicky (Shu Qi), 10 years later, in 2011. It dwells in the Taipei rave scene, rife with drugs and lowlifes, crime, bad relationships. Vicky and her boyfriend, the overbearingly abusive Hao-Hao (Chun-hao Tuan), live together in a dump. They do drugs and try to get by. She works as a hostess in a popular night spot. They circle one another warily. They are never at ease together.
In a way it did not surprise me to learn that Maggie Cheung and Tony Leung Chiu-wai were first offered the roles. Millennium Mambo reminded me a lot of the pictures of Wong Kar-Wai (In the Mood for Love, Chungking Express) and even more of Hou’s countrymen Edward Yang (Yi Yi, A Brighter Summer Day) and Tsai Ming-liang (What Time Is It There?). The camera is liquid, often in motion, images may be out of focus, amounting only to blotches of color, though often vivid and always expressive. The pace is slow, studied, deliberate. Hao-Hao is some kind of DJ, and EDM is a pulsing constant, even in the background as if from the next apartment. In Millennium Mambo—in many of these pictures—the style is in direct opposition to the terms of the narrative, which is explicitly, even wantonly, focused on squalor. As cognitive dissonance it is exquisite.
This confusing but beautiful and often striking picture is the first I’ve seen by Taiwanese director Hsiao-Hsien Hou. My points to follow may thus (actually, as always) say more about me than the movie or any of its principals. It was released in 2001, and it is set in 2001 (perhaps to avoid arguments about which millennium the year 2000 belongs to), but the premise is that the events are memories of the main character, Vicky (Shu Qi), 10 years later, in 2011. It dwells in the Taipei rave scene, rife with drugs and lowlifes, crime, bad relationships. Vicky and her boyfriend, the overbearingly abusive Hao-Hao (Chun-hao Tuan), live together in a dump. They do drugs and try to get by. She works as a hostess in a popular night spot. They circle one another warily. They are never at ease together.
In a way it did not surprise me to learn that Maggie Cheung and Tony Leung Chiu-wai were first offered the roles. Millennium Mambo reminded me a lot of the pictures of Wong Kar-Wai (In the Mood for Love, Chungking Express) and even more of Hou’s countrymen Edward Yang (Yi Yi, A Brighter Summer Day) and Tsai Ming-liang (What Time Is It There?). The camera is liquid, often in motion, images may be out of focus, amounting only to blotches of color, though often vivid and always expressive. The pace is slow, studied, deliberate. Hao-Hao is some kind of DJ, and EDM is a pulsing constant, even in the background as if from the next apartment. In Millennium Mambo—in many of these pictures—the style is in direct opposition to the terms of the narrative, which is explicitly, even wantonly, focused on squalor. As cognitive dissonance it is exquisite.
But these terms of the narrative too often felt too familiar for me. Hao-Hao’s attempts to control Vicky include dumping out her purse regularly and going through it item by item, eventually graduating to appalling strip searches of her. God knows there are bad, abusive relationships in this world. Shining a light on them is much like shining a light on cockroaches. Abusers scatter away when confronted on their bullying. It’s just, I’ve seen enough of these stories in the movies and literature and in real life too. They make me sick as they go down and I’m a little put off by making them so beautiful. The cognitive dissonance works against itself for me on this point.
Vicky eventually escapes Hao-Hao and enters into a somewhat chaste and poorly defined relationship with a man named Jack (Jack Kao). Jack seems to be as shady as everyone else Vicky knows, coming from some adjacent criminal world. His world doesn’t seem much better than the one she is getting out of, but at least the cryptic, older Jack does not seem so inclined toward abuse. You never know. But before long Jack disappears from the action, on the run from something apparently.
The scene shifts a couple times to the Yubari Film Festival in Hokkaido, Japan, an annual winter event which seems more like an excuse for director Hou to explore the beautiful conditions of deep frigid winter with bitter cold and large amounts of snow. Not to mention an opportunity to shout out cinema culture. As it happens, Yubari has a lot of the look and feel of the Sundance Film Festival in Utah every January. These parts of the movie, while quite beautiful, feel self-indulgent, and they do undermine a bit the narrative point about the poverty of these people. It can’t be that easy to just travel between Japan and Taiwan.
But, as with the rest, they are very nice to look at and dream with, at deliberate pace, letting the camera flow and the images take you. I tried to make some sense of the title, where I’ve tended to read “mambo” as a sort of synonym of “jam,” meaning my expectation is for joints put together by intuition, vibes, hunches. But the mambo is also a Cuban ballroom dance, and IMDb trivia further informs that “Mambo means ‘conversations with Gods’ in Kikango.” Kikongo is a Bantu language spoken in central Africa. I’m not sure what that is supposed to have to do with Taiwan or anything in this picture.
I did look up “where to start with Hsiao-Hsien Hou” on the internet and saw that Millennium Mambo, while often near the top of some lists, was not the place. The Time to Live and the Time to Die, which I could not readily find, and Three Times were mentioned perhaps most often. I know I will be writing about A City of Sadness sooner rather than later, but the internet designates that one with “The Masterpieces (for Later Viewing).” Quite a dilemma I’ve got here, but actually I think it would be enjoyable to have a little Hou festival and watch a handful of them or more. Millennium Mambo has its small problems, but it goes down easy and is often good enough to look again.
Vicky eventually escapes Hao-Hao and enters into a somewhat chaste and poorly defined relationship with a man named Jack (Jack Kao). Jack seems to be as shady as everyone else Vicky knows, coming from some adjacent criminal world. His world doesn’t seem much better than the one she is getting out of, but at least the cryptic, older Jack does not seem so inclined toward abuse. You never know. But before long Jack disappears from the action, on the run from something apparently.
The scene shifts a couple times to the Yubari Film Festival in Hokkaido, Japan, an annual winter event which seems more like an excuse for director Hou to explore the beautiful conditions of deep frigid winter with bitter cold and large amounts of snow. Not to mention an opportunity to shout out cinema culture. As it happens, Yubari has a lot of the look and feel of the Sundance Film Festival in Utah every January. These parts of the movie, while quite beautiful, feel self-indulgent, and they do undermine a bit the narrative point about the poverty of these people. It can’t be that easy to just travel between Japan and Taiwan.
But, as with the rest, they are very nice to look at and dream with, at deliberate pace, letting the camera flow and the images take you. I tried to make some sense of the title, where I’ve tended to read “mambo” as a sort of synonym of “jam,” meaning my expectation is for joints put together by intuition, vibes, hunches. But the mambo is also a Cuban ballroom dance, and IMDb trivia further informs that “Mambo means ‘conversations with Gods’ in Kikango.” Kikongo is a Bantu language spoken in central Africa. I’m not sure what that is supposed to have to do with Taiwan or anything in this picture.
I did look up “where to start with Hsiao-Hsien Hou” on the internet and saw that Millennium Mambo, while often near the top of some lists, was not the place. The Time to Live and the Time to Die, which I could not readily find, and Three Times were mentioned perhaps most often. I know I will be writing about A City of Sadness sooner rather than later, but the internet designates that one with “The Masterpieces (for Later Viewing).” Quite a dilemma I’ve got here, but actually I think it would be enjoyable to have a little Hou festival and watch a handful of them or more. Millennium Mambo has its small problems, but it goes down easy and is often good enough to look again.
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