Millennium Mambo

Director: Hou Hsiao-hsien

2001 / 107min / DCP

A stylish and seductive submersion into the techno-scored neon nightlife of Taipei, Hou’s much-misunderstood marvel stars Shu Qi (The Assassin) as an aimless bar hostess drifting away from her blowhard boyfriend and towards Jack Kao’s suave, sensitive gangster. Structured as a flashback to the then-present from the then-future of 2011, it’s a transfixing trance-out of a movie, drenched in club lights, ecstatic endorphin-rush exhilaration, and a nagging undercurrent of ennui. Hou and longtime cinematographer Lee here break from their familiar pattern of elegantly composed long shot long takes to create something both more intimate and hectic, a film whose shallow-focus images, jittery camerawork, and cramped locations evoke both the claustrophobic character of Taiwan’s capital city and, in Lee’s words, “the feeling of youth.”

Distributor: Metrograph Pictures