Millennium Mambo

Master filmmaker Hou Hsiao-Hsien directs this look at life in modern Taipei, the first part of a planned series. The film opens with a vivacious lass named Vicky (Shu Qi) sauntering down a neon-lit tunnel as the voice-over describes how she is going to break up with her on and off boyfriend Hao Hao ...more

Millennium Mambo is easily one of Hou Hsiao-Hsien's most challenging and intellectual works in an oeuvre of consistently challenging and intellectual films. Like his 1998 work Goodbye South, Goodbye, Hou's vision of modern Taiwanese society is one of constant distraction -- cell phones, pounding techno music, and drugs of every ilk from speed to alcohol to tobacco. Yet whereas Goodbye balanced the crazed schemes of the protagonists with the images of nature, Mambo offers no such release. Set ...more