Chris Knipp 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.

Gatto I don't get Hou Hsiao-hsien. I saw Goodbye South and rated it a 1. Each film (this and Goodbye) features aimless idiots in a monotonous "slice of life." They're not just lowlifes. They're lowlifes that offer no insight. They are boring in their self-indulgent childishness. The women seem to be these pretty (or breathlessly gorgeous in Qi Shu's case) innocents who stick by men who are bad for them. It's really not entertaining to watch morons do nothing. Awful.I gave this a 3 only because of Qi Shu and the background music.I'm curious to watch Flowers of Shanghai. Or maybe I should only watch a film of Hou's from 1980-1989. The person who wrote his mini-bio on IMDb says he won seven awards out of his ten films during that period. Bribery?

rufasff This film is made in the slow style recalling some of the naturalistic elements of the new wave, or all the many moviemakers who have tried to copy suchfilmmaking. The film is the story of a rather vapid, not very bright girl who shacks up with her high school boyfriend, an utter loser with no life. She then gets involved with some very low level criminals some of whom seem to be ratherdecent sorts. Then, it's over. Films like this always seem to be searching, trying to find something to compel our interest. This movie fails totally. Some of the scenes feel improvised and the actors do O.K., but this is an uninteresting film about the uninteresting. So how did this get made? Well, star Shi Qi is truely a stunning beauty who seems like she could act at least a bit if ever given something to play. Beyond that, we have an artistic fraud here of the first order.

Zargo 'Millennium Mambo' is a surreal, enigmatic film exploring the developments in the life of Vicky. Vicky is young woman who struggles to end her miserable relationship with her abusive boyfriend Hao-Hao, who she's lived with since her teenage years.I'm left wondering whether there are hidden meanings to this film that are above my head, or whether there is actually all that much substance there in the beginning.It all managed to be fairly entrancing however, thanks to the magnetic performance of Shu Qi, who proved she is much more then just an extraordinarily beautiful face and figure.She effortlessly keeps the viewer's attention during endlessly long takes where not a lot appears to be happening.