This is simply a love story that doesn’t belong to anyone, limited to the place absent of the girl’s off screen narration: the concept of abstract time in the Taiwanese director’s film.


Memory seen as emptiness, as space to be occupied with the movement of timeless memories, chronologies that deny themselves in a certain subjectivity of narration, which doesn’t offer the sense of what’s happening (hence of existence), but only offers the sensation of time which doesn’t exist anymore.

“Millennium Mambo” is the Hou Hsiao Hsien film which, more than any other, anaesthetises the sense of the story in a perpetual progression of the play as organisation of the existential space offered to characters who don’t have more than one way of being, dispersions in the denied biography of bodies which materialise as performations of an existence that belongs elsewhere.

This is simply a love story that doesn’t belong to anyone, not to Vicky nor to Hao Hao nor to Jack, limited to the place absent of the girl’s off screen narration. The hypothesis of a saying which belongs among what as already been experienced but doesn’t because of this belong to a concrete biography…

On the other hand memory’s place has always been existential space in Hou Hiso Hsien’s filmmaking, the thought that materialises in a memory of a biographical time (the boys from Fengkuej and City of sadness) or imaginary (Daughter of the Nile and The puppetmaster) to which the present doesn’t offer anymore reality.

And so “Millennium Mambo”, written on the verge of a century, is the film in which this director can make his imagination’s transparent chronologies flow, the hypothesis of time’s performance that possesses wholly the scenic form.

There aren’t anymore bodies but only shadows which act obscured by a chronology they don’t even remember anymore. The sense of the events that possesses those bodies can’t be expressed logically to their existence, but only through a diacronic materialization of time, the only and absolute co-ordinate that only recognises it’s flowing, without offering any possibility to reason, hence to feelings…

This may be why “Millennium Mambo” appears so distant to both our minds and the mind of the characters: how may Time be remembered if it doesn’t have chronologies…
And this probably why Hou Hsiao Hsien occludes his film in a dimension of space that, unusually, doesn’t have area nor prospective, just portions and fragments: “Millennium Mango” is completely written on “short” ranges (medium, occasionally total, almost never on long ranges), not a single level…
Some ranges which cover the shot’s distance, searched for and obtained by long focal points that close in on the shot, as if they where to deny a concrete place’s existence, as if they where to obey the director’s need to not use a certain space… Using colour to occlude more, colour that manipulates each body, object, colours which serve to render everything abstract. The director pursues abstract environments with a placid obsession…

Except the sequences in Japan, dominated by the snow’s white that levels everything unlike the scenes filmed in Taipei, Taipei is possible because out of the dimension of time, surrounded in it’s originally reality, but also limited in the cinematographic advertisement’s pure and total fiction. The ads are placed on the town’s walls: they are the only reference to the dimensions of time and space conceived according to an existence. Obviously an imaginary one…

(traduzione a cura di Giuliano Capogrossi Colognesi)


Original title: Qianxi manbo
Direction: Hou Hsiao Hsien
Screenplay: Chu Tien-wen
Cinematography: Mark Lee Ping-bing
Editing: Liao Ching-Sung
Scenograhy: Hwrang Wern_ying
Costumes: Wang Kuan-i
Make-up: Liao Shu-jen
Original Music: Lim Giong, Yoshiro Hanno
Sound: Tu Duu-chih, Kuo LI-chi
Actors: Shu Qi (Vicky),Jack Kao (Jack), Tuan Chu-hao (Hao-Hao), Takeuchi Jun (Jun), Takeuchi Ko (Ko), Niu Chen-er (Doze), Kao Kuo-guang (Godi), Chen Yi-hsuan (Xuan), Jenny Tseng (Jenny)
Producer: Chu Tien-wen - Eric Heumann
Executive Producer: Hwarng Wern-ying, Gilles Ciment
Production: 3H Productions - Paradis Films - Orly Films - SinoMovie.com
Distribution (in Italy): Istituto Luce
Time: 105’
Countries of origin/ year of production: Taiwan/France, 2001