Millennium Mambo

Dir. Hsiao-hsien Hou, 2001

Taiwanese Director Hsiao-hsien Hou’s film, Millennium Mambo, takes its time telling the story of young Vicky, who, like the film itself, suffers from pampered, fin-de-siècle ennui—that is to say, stylized boredom. Narrated by an unidentified woman (presumably an older and wiser Vicky), the movie drowses though episodes treating her various relationships; there is a dimwitted hoodlum, a sensitive Japanese guy, and a paternal gangster. Forgive me if these descriptions are a bit two dimensional, but it is hard to say much else for a movie that seems to deal almost exclusively in surfaces. This sounds worse than it is, because if Millennium Mambo is superficial and directionless, it is self-consciously and artfully so.

Millennium Mambo works through tones and impressions. In the opening scene, the narrator explains that Vicky lived her life as if “under a spell, hypnotized…” The film’s visual style reinforces this notion, offering a vision of a life lived in a kind of muffled, self-willed anesthesia. The formal acumen used to achieve this effect should not be dismissed. Hsiao-hsien shoots his scenes in long, uninterrupted takes. His camera is stationary and never enters the action of a scene; instead, it slowly and constantly pans the scenes, restlessly searching its characters for meaning that never materializes. Millennium Mambo gives us life the way Vicky experiences it; it passively observes the world but never really engages it. This is the cinema of isolation.

This movie is a little piece of poesy that has picked its tone and executed it to perfection, perhaps too perfectly, because, despite its moments of beauty, this meditation on alienation leaves us both exhausted and unsatisfied.