One other nice movie by a real auteur
Three years after “Flowers of Shanghai”, Hou Hsiao-hsen launched “Millennium Mambo”, a movie that signaled one other change in his themes, because it offers with the lifetime of youths in modern Taiwan. “Millennium Mambo” inaugurated his collaborations with Shu Qi, who performed the protagonist roles in most of his later works. The movie was screened in additional movie festivals than any of his earlier works and was the primary to obtain distribution within the US, though restricted.
Vicky has just lately moved to Taipei from Keelung and works doing PR in a nightclub. Hao Hao is her jealous boyfriend who checks every little thing she does, together with her financial institution transactions, her cellphone calls, and even her physique scent. She spends her days working, doing medication and preventing with Hao Hao, a minimum of when they don’t seem to be having intercourse. In some unspecified time in the future, Hao Hao begins having bother with the police. Vicky is pissed off along with her life and finds solace in Jack, a charitable gangster and bar proprietor. She regularly begins to really feel snug with him whereas his tendency to supply assist to whoever wants it, creates severe bother for him. Finally, Vicky visits Yubari in Japan, when Jack has to go and deal with some enterprise there…
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Aside from the change in theme, the movie is hardly just like the standard cinematographic model of Hou that features lengthy and prolonged photographs, because it options many close-ups (though the motion is just not positioned on the middle of the body as soon as extra) and frequent cuts. In essence, the visible model, together with the pervasive melancholy of the megalopolis and the dissatisfaction inside a romantic relationship, is vividly reminisced of Wong Kar Wai, a incontrovertible fact that was most likely because of the cinematographer of the movie, Mark Lee Ping Bin working in “Within the Temper for Love”. Nonetheless, this was not a u-turn, for the reason that aforementioned components are nonetheless depicted via Hou’s distinct calmness, although the connection introduced right here is genuinely exploitative.
Shu Qi’s narration,
which principally offers along with her personal story and really features as a manner of
presenting the elements of the story that aren’t depicted on display screen, work fairly
properly for the narrative, because it induces it with a way of nostalgia.
And speaking
about Shu Qi, she provides a beautiful efficiency, in excellent resonance with the
minimalism that characterizes the movie, along with her presenting her emotions principally
via her physique stances and eyes. On the identical time, the few moments she lashes
out are additionally spectacular. Expectedly, the movie revolves additionally round her magnificence,
with the digicam highlighting her in each probability, in a variety of totally different
appearances: plain, informal, posh and so forth, in all of which, although, she seems
attractive. Each the digicam and the directorial strategy to her appear as in the event that they
are in love along with her, and he or she appears to get pleasure from and really draw from the very fact.
“Millennium Mambo” is one other nice movie by a real auteur, and a should look ahead to all followers of cinema.
