Event

Millenium Mambo

A bar hostess, fed up with her jealous boyfriend, finds a refuge of sorts with a local gangster. Set as the world rings in a new millennium, this is the story of a young woman whose life is in flux, where even the present is a future past.

"Millennium Mambo is a film of the future, set in a past that is the contemporary viewers present, and Mark Lee Ping-bins cinematography unfurls in a blur of motion and color that clarifies only ephemeral emotions, like the reflecting of a blinking yellow light that hovers over two people making love, or Jacks tinted windshield illuminated a second at a time by tunnel lights, throwing the sight of Vicky sleeping on his shoulder into fleeting chiaroscuro." Movie Mezzanine

"Hou is in the company of Maurice Pialat or Béla Tarr: he sets up a scene not in order to transform it, but to contemplate and study it, to slowly unfold its levels and implications. Like a master chef, he stirs in the ingredients, the background information, the poetic motifs, the signs of historical and narrative context. It is up to us, as spectators or analysts, to intuit and draw out all these elements."Cristina Álvarez López, Adrian Martin, Fandor

"Even setting aside its position in Hous ouevre, Mambo stands on its own as an incredibly accomplished, if less than fully satisfying, piece of filmmaking. Isnt it worth considering Millennium Mambo on the terms it sets for itself before making a prima facie judgment as to its merit, to ask why Hous made a film that is so lovely and elusive, enthralling and empty? To put a very fine point on it, what if the films disjointed fragments and underdramatized vignettes are, in fact, the point?" Reverse Shot