It's half satisfying and half disappointing that Hou Hsiao-Hsien's Millennium Mambo is so bad. Since I was first introduced to his work nine or so months ago, I have been convinced that his style represents an interesting wrong turn in the evolution of cinema, once in a while producing empassioned but confusing (and dull) films like Dust in the Wind and City of Sadness, and once producing a film very nearly a masterpiece, Flowers of Shanghai, but usually producing flat, unemotional, and forgettable films like A Time to Live a Time to Die, The Puppetmaster, and Goodbye South Goodbye. Hou simply refuses to give the audience characters to whom they can react to emotionally, instead building these fascinating ultra-long takes where we watch the characters go about their usual business, all of which only serve, unfortunately, to bore me.
In Millennium Mambo, we track a year in the life of an independent teenage girl, Vicky, in the year 2001. The film is narrated from ten years in the future, a very curious decision. It could have worked well, but it feels like just a gimmick here. Hou desperately wants the situations to feel nostalghic, but that's not really possible in any way in this particular film.
The major problem in Millennium Mambo is that the characters and the situation are entirely cliche and, well, dull at that. Vicky is a club kid who is being pulled between two guys, the uber-jealous thug Hao-hao and the kind but vaguely threatening Jack, a Japanese gangster. Vicky goes in between the two of them; Hao-hao keeps coming back to get her and, whenever Vicky runs away from him, she ends up going back to Jack. None of the characters are well developed, and even if they were you really couldn't care much about them. In between there are a dozen stock Hou scenes like eating and other such things, a lot of long and dull scenes of drug use, etc. There is one major alteration in the style: the camera moves around almost violently all the time, in nearly every scene, if not every scene. In his early films, Hou barely ever moved the camera. In Goodbye South Goodbye, Hou started to move his camera a bit. I dismissed it as a fancy that would pass, since it was nothing major (see my review for it). I was wrong, and in Flowers of Shanghai the camera would rock beautifully back and forth across the scenes. The pattern didn't change much in that film, but it all worked so marvelously, just adding to the mood and not boring. Now, in Millennium Mambo, almost everything is filmed in close-up and the camera follows these close ups in sharp jerks. It doesn't do anything, unfortunately. Other than being an extremely noticeable alteration of style, Hou hasn't changed his content, editing, or narrative patterns at all from Goodbye South Goodbye (again, I pine for the stylistic leaps in Flowers of Shanghai). The characters and themes are similar to previous films, the editing is interesting but has long-since become cliche for Hou, and the scenes all develop exactly the same as they always have.
Millennium Mambo is actually more dull than any other Hou film, making it his worst that I've seen. I'd say avoid it at all costs, except for the fact that I want intelligent people on my side of this argument. Hou has received far too much critical praise, and I am convinced that if a majority of cineastes would see his work they'd agree with me. I say, then, see it just to see how bad this guy is. I say praise Tsai Ming-liang, dismiss Hou Hsiao-hsien. Tsai is the future of modern cinema, at least one important corner of it. If that opinion exists more consistently, Taiwanese cinema will improve and become more prominent. 5/10.
In Millennium Mambo, we track a year in the life of an independent teenage girl, Vicky, in the year 2001. The film is narrated from ten years in the future, a very curious decision. It could have worked well, but it feels like just a gimmick here. Hou desperately wants the situations to feel nostalghic, but that's not really possible in any way in this particular film.
The major problem in Millennium Mambo is that the characters and the situation are entirely cliche and, well, dull at that. Vicky is a club kid who is being pulled between two guys, the uber-jealous thug Hao-hao and the kind but vaguely threatening Jack, a Japanese gangster. Vicky goes in between the two of them; Hao-hao keeps coming back to get her and, whenever Vicky runs away from him, she ends up going back to Jack. None of the characters are well developed, and even if they were you really couldn't care much about them. In between there are a dozen stock Hou scenes like eating and other such things, a lot of long and dull scenes of drug use, etc. There is one major alteration in the style: the camera moves around almost violently all the time, in nearly every scene, if not every scene. In his early films, Hou barely ever moved the camera. In Goodbye South Goodbye, Hou started to move his camera a bit. I dismissed it as a fancy that would pass, since it was nothing major (see my review for it). I was wrong, and in Flowers of Shanghai the camera would rock beautifully back and forth across the scenes. The pattern didn't change much in that film, but it all worked so marvelously, just adding to the mood and not boring. Now, in Millennium Mambo, almost everything is filmed in close-up and the camera follows these close ups in sharp jerks. It doesn't do anything, unfortunately. Other than being an extremely noticeable alteration of style, Hou hasn't changed his content, editing, or narrative patterns at all from Goodbye South Goodbye (again, I pine for the stylistic leaps in Flowers of Shanghai). The characters and themes are similar to previous films, the editing is interesting but has long-since become cliche for Hou, and the scenes all develop exactly the same as they always have.
Millennium Mambo is actually more dull than any other Hou film, making it his worst that I've seen. I'd say avoid it at all costs, except for the fact that I want intelligent people on my side of this argument. Hou has received far too much critical praise, and I am convinced that if a majority of cineastes would see his work they'd agree with me. I say, then, see it just to see how bad this guy is. I say praise Tsai Ming-liang, dismiss Hou Hsiao-hsien. Tsai is the future of modern cinema, at least one important corner of it. If that opinion exists more consistently, Taiwanese cinema will improve and become more prominent. 5/10.