Defining Favourites: Millennium Mambo (2001)

A transfixing 21st century romance told to us like a memory, Hou Hsiao-hsien recalls a search for happiness at the turn of the new millennium.

image via Metrograph Pictures

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Directed by Hou Hsiao-hsien
Screenplay by Chu T’ien-wen
Produced by Chu T’ien-wen, Cilles Ciment, Eric Heumann, Wen-Ying Huang
Starring Shu Qi, Jack Kao, Chun-hao Tuan, Yi-hsuan Chen
Release Date: November 17, 2001
Running Time: 119 minutes

It’s the start of a new century, both at the time of the release of Millennium Mambo but also for its director, Hou Hsiao-hsien. But even as everything might seem new to both himself and the story he’s telling in here, it all feels like it’s doomed to someday become a thing of the past. This is how Millennium Mambo starts off, with its opening shot of the youthful Vicky (played by Shu Qi), who narrates that this is a story that happened ten years ago. But in that youthfulness that we look back upon, perhaps the recklessness of it all is something that sticks with us even in our adult years, making the presentation of these memories feel so melancholy.

For Hou Hsiao-hsien, Millennium Mambo was his first film to be set within a contemporaneous setting since 1987’s Daughter of the Nile, but it still plays out like a memory. For the viewers, what we’re seeing in Millennium Mambo might very well be what we’re living within, as it is indeed their present day, at the start of the twenty-first century. As Vicky’s narration would show it to be, these memories that might have defined her youth might indeed be something of an afterthought for her, but to Hou Hsiao-hsien, it also feels like it’s presented with the intention of calling to the viewers that how we live within the moment shouldn’t be wasted away.