‘Millennium Mambo’: Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s definitive Taiwanese New Wave stylisations
The New Wave of Taiwanese cinema has led to some of the most influential pieces of work, marked by its visual poetry and slowness that creates a heightened sense of realism and introspection, an emotional echo chamber for the inner worlds of its characters and viewers. There’s a feeling of ease and care that’s applied to each frame through the long and measured takes, allowing us to sit in the smaller moments that mark our everyday lives: shots of people walking, cooking and smoking. While it allows us to connect more intimately with the characters by seeing the often-overlooked details of our daily routines, it also instils a sense of loneliness, with shots framed through curtains and doorways that make the people appear somewhat contained and trapped. And one of the most influential directors within this movement is Hou Hsiao-Hsien, and his 2001 film Millenium Mambo.
While Hou was pivotal to the progress of the Taiwanese New Wave, his early style was fairly different to the films he eventually made. During the 1980s, Hou was introduced to writer Chu Ti’en-Wen, who became a lifelong collaborator and great influence as he developed his style. He directed Cute Girl, Cheerful Wind, and The Green, Green Grass of Home, each being successful in their own right, but they were symbolic of the confines of mainstream cinema in Taiwan at the time. Romantic comedies were very popular, with a tendency towards action-heavy plots and generally light and fluffy messaging, with less of the rich emotional undercurrent that we associate with his later films.
However, shortly after they began working together, Chu gave Hou a book that is rumoured to have prompted the thematic and visual shifts in his work – the auto-biography of Chinese author Shen Congwen, which he later described as being instrumental in his journey of creative self-discovery, a journey that the likes of Tsai-Ming Liang and Edward Yang were also embarking on.
In the years to follow, realism began to play a bigger role in their films, creating loosely auto-biographical tales such as Dust in the Wind, Flowers of Shanghai, City of Sadness and The Boys from Fengkuei, which were all vaguely based on the lives and experiences of both filmmakers, creating a world of memory and nostalgia that became a strong theme in their combined work. Throughout these films, you can see the fascination towards capturing the simple beauty of day-to-day life, with an emphasis on the small moments that build up a life and the cumulative effect they have on our identity. By the turn of the millennium, Hou’s work was beginning to show many of the qualities that were emblematic of this new era of filmmaking, qualities that became all the more refined in Millenium Mambo.
Millenium Mambo, starring Shu Qi, follows a woman named Vicki as she reflects on her past romances in the grungy nightclubs of Taipei. The story unfolds in a blur of memory and reality, with each element flowing into the other to create a perfect symbiosis of story, image, and colour, a feeling as hazy as the nature of nostalgia and hindsight itself.
Hou elevates his visual style to create a uniquely non-linear story that mirrors Vicki’s sense of impermanence, exaggerating this through the darkness and strange flashing colours of the underground parties, quick cuts and painstakingly long takes, all adding to this feeling of Vicki being stuck in an in-between world as she wanders between the lines of her past and confines of her future.
The film is punctuated by sequences that seem to flash by in a whir of pulsing music and then moments of haunting stillness that are narrated by Vicki herself, speaking out loud as she brings to life her old flames, even speaking of herself in third person. This method acts as a constant push and pull, ebbs and flows in which we temporarily feel connected to her, with Hou then rejecting this intimacy and creating distance between Vicki and the audience, with moments where she walks off frame and we’re left looking at an empty wall or doorframe, or soft focus shots in which we don’t know what we’re supposed to be looking at all.
The work both unifies and isolates its audience, the slowness a deliberate resistance to the speed of an increasingly modern world. It’s both thoughtful and uncaring towards the watchers, a story that demands patience, which is arguably what makes his work most captivating.
The final shot of the film is the widest: an empty street during the winter, cold yet sentimental. After observing the quiet moments of life, feigning an imitation of intimacy, we feel as if we know Vicki. But the truth is less forgiving, and the final shot reminds us that we never did, and in the bigger picture, she is alone.
