Millennium Mambo (Qianxi manbo)

Directed by Hsiao-hsien Hou

Written by T'ien-wen Chu

Starring:  Qi Shu, Jack Kao and Chun-hao Tuan

120 Minutes Runtime

MPAA: Rated R for language, drug content and some sexuality

USA Release: Dec 31, 2003

Review based on the DVD from Palm Pictures

Rating (Out of 5 stars):  *** 1/2

Winner of the Grand Prix Technique at the 2001 Cannes Film Festival and a remarkable Taiwanese entry into the realm of neo-film noir, “Millennium Mambo” takes “Rebel Without a Cause” one step further into the techno-abyss of Pacific Rim countries changing rapidly with an option on violence.  The beautiful Qi Shu plays Vicki, a young, naive woman confronting a Chinese society that is changing too fast and chasing a rainbow of peace and contentment she can never have.  Torn between two men, Jack and Hao-Hao, her attempts to do the right thing always seem to end in failure.  But she never gives up; walking her blue neon streets like Fellini’s Cabiria, ever hopeful of finding peace.

Vicky has moved from the country home of her youth to the big city.  Everything American is all the craze, of course, and this extends to her circle of friends whose main occupation seems to be dressing and looking good for a night out at the local cabaret.  Writer T'ien-wen Chu is concerned with the impact of a shift to American values and capitalist urban life in a country that traditionally placed great value on the basic attributes of hard work and honesty.  The characters in this film exhibit neither hard work nor honesty, but the actors certainly do, packing emotion into every scene and smoking endless cigarettes against the black backdrop of nightclub interiors.  The sound track is one hundred percent techno, minimal and heartless; but glamorous and strong at the same time in its stark simplicity.

In T'ien-wen’s world, the result of a lack of fundamental values is not so much death and destruction as it is an eternal purgatory of aimless wondering and that is the body of the movie.  Vicki is every young person in China who is looking to exchange modern western values for the old, outdated values of her traditional nation.  In doing this Vicki is not unlike millions of Americans who traded in their plows for cars and factory jobs in pre and post WWII America.  They were the pioneers of a socio-economic change that in its own way threatened the stability of America as much as the civil war.  A temporary loss of direction that America survived mainly because there was so much opportunity for everyone that people were not overly tempted to turn to crime to get the status they sought in the new world.

Such is not the case in China, according to “Millennium Mambo.”  Short-cuts are required to achieve status in the new, young society of Vicky, Jack and Hao-Hao.  Jack is connected to mysterious and ill-defined underworld players who offer solutions leading to affluence within the new rules of the game.  Coolness is imperative.  Vicky’s abusive partner Hao-Hao doesn’t quite have the formula yet; the best he can do is steal his father’s Rolex, pawn it and then go to jail when the police find the pawn ticket in a routine search of the apartment.  Who is better off, Jack or Hao-Hao?  Or are they just two lost souls playing the same losing game at different levels?  Affluence is not only fleeting in T'ien-wen Chu’s world, it is an apparition as well.  An apparition that leads first to a fog of ill-disposition, and then to death.

Director Hsiao-hsien teams up with cinematographer Lee Ping-Bing to pull the subtle glow of Vicki and the nightclub scene against a backdrop of techno-industrial symbols in a world changing fast.  The film is all about a loss of reference and people roaming about in search of the good life.  Many of the backgrounds are hard, reflective surfaces that generate several scenes within a scene, allowing the director to present a theme in several ways at the same time.  Frequent backdrops are the flush hard steel and glass exteriors of buildings in which are reflected symbols of movement such as traffic and railroad trains.  The first scene of love-making is done in the most remarkable reflective technique with glass fading to flashing lights and eventually to the couple in the flesh.  The hard, efficient enclosures threaten to steal and entrap the souls of the lovers.

When Jack leaves Vicki with nothing more than a cell-phone with a recorded message asking her to come join him in Japan, Vicki listens to the message with the extended scene of a railroad train and the curving exterior surface of an ultra-modern building in the background.  As she waits in her room, the presence of the trains outside becomes more and more over-bearing.  There is tremendous visual and audio pressure on the audience and on the character to move on.  Search for something new, which she finally does.

As she makes the final move out of her bed and towards the door, the window reflects the flickering pattern of static on the room TV screen, with the train shooting by outside in a low mass of movement, like an extended bullet across the horizon.  As the senselessly flickering TV screen reflects its mindless message of failure and confusion, Vicki’s form moves across the window and she becomes the message in the TV; replacing the mechanistic garble with what is left of her surviving humanity.  She takes a last drag on her cigarette and leaves the hotel room like Jim Carrey’s Truman Burbank.  Cutting to snowy Hokkaido, Vicki leaves the blue neon behind and opens the door to a life of her own making, no longer a prisoner in a world with no future.

A stirring piece of work by Hsiao-hsien Hou and T'ien-wen Chu, two real pros who have grasped the heart of the film noir genre, “Millennium Mambo” will be too slow for many in American audiences.  But this is exactly Hsiao-hsien’s point.  As he says in the interview on the DVD from Palm Pictures, “Too much action makes the audience think too much and they miss the point of the picture.”  The point is to grasp the symbols and the feelings, as opposed to the surface plot.  One hopes American audiences are up to the challenge