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Rating:
"One evening Vicky, while making love with Hao Hao, imagined for a moment that he was a snowman. That at sunrise he would melt and disappear from her life. It was sad to make love that time."
Together with what I consider my favorite director (Tsai Ming-Liang), Hou Hsiao-Hsien is the central figure of the new Taiwanese cinema. Over thirty years of activity and many films revolving around the theme of memory, time, and the impossibility of permanently grasping bodies, emotions, and situations.
Time, therefore. The distant memory of an existence that has evolved and perhaps ceased to exist.
The uniqueness of the extraordinary "Millennium Mambo," a film that is both simple and minimalistic but also complex and rich, does not fall into a historical moment to remember and relive (as often happened in Hou Hsiao-Hsien's cinema, even in the delightful "Café Lumière" -2003- which reproduces a contemporary world alienated and alienating as a callback to the cinema of Yasujiro Ozu, now buried in nostalgia), but in the contemporary.
A 2001 film, a 2001 story, but told from the future, ten years later. A story, indeed, told in 2011 that goes backward into abstract relationships, from a female voiceover that does not appear in the story as a character, almost telling us that "this tale of small lives is actually a historical photograph to study and analyze."
But what is "Millennium Mambo" about? The basic narrative line is as simple as imaginable: Vicky (the magnetic and extraordinary Shu Qi) is a strong-willed girl who spends her days in clubs and discos, amidst rivers of alcohol and cigarettes, under the continuous and obsessive electronic beats of diegetic and non-diegetic techno music. Dissatisfied with love, she is divided between a jealous and unbearable boyfriend, Hao Hao, to whom she is inexplicably attached, and Jack, sweet and understanding, who takes her under his wing and makes her feel truly loved.
End.
We are talking about a classic love triangle, floating between neon lights and suspended times, conveying the impossibility of understanding the reality we live in (and the direction is perfect in conveying it: between continuous and rarefied out-of-focus shots and saturated but elegant colors).
"Millennium Mambo" tells nothing really concrete, yet it can be followed perfectly without a single drop of boredom: it envelops, immerses, moves.
There is a subtle and poetic melancholy in every single frame, even in those shot in nightclubs and discos.
We proceed between snowfalls in Hokkaido and saunas, between cramped apartments full of colorful objects and hotels screaming solitude, accompanied by cigarettes endlessly lit. Cigarettes that mark the time of the narration: lit nervously, smoked with pleasure, extinguished, abandoned, waiting for concrete answers that seem not to arrive.
Alienation? The film tells this, but it does not do so with the typical approach of many other authors. It does not provoke, does not make one suffer, does not bore with scenes of unsustainable lengths: "Millennium Mambo" is exquisitely sincere and romantic. It has no pretensions of grandeur, yet it manages to be a great film where one can recognize oneself. Hou's camera seems to be madly in love with Shu Qi's face, following her with lightness and admiration, but doesn't disdain even the minor characters, written with grace and intelligence.
"Millennium Mambo" is a love triangle, as we said. But, for once, it is a triangle that belongs to no one: neither to Vicky, nor Hao Hao, nor Jack. Only the search and the desire to live remain.
Sad and melancholic, but not desperate, "Millennium Mambo" takes us through nightclubs and then into a snowfall, telling us that even if we really lived in a land of snowmen, that if all were to melt and vanish from our lives, we could still continue to love.
Absolutely a must-see (and re-watch), a movie that manages to transform the simplicity of life into pure and tangible emotions and that will remain with you. A film that should be seen even just for the opening: one of the most beautiful long takes in history, with Shu Qi turning towards the camera saying, "Follow me, I want to take you into my life for a moment." And she does it with her eyes and smile, not with words.
Already in that scene lies all the power of cinema, of memories, extremely aesthetic yet extraordinarily human.
The strength of Hou Hsiao-Hsien is all here.
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