Fleeting life...Radical; magic Silence; electricEuphoric.......A bridge; blue lights above; the girl walks through the neon lights... The music plays; a happy, energetic, young song; it captures the energy of youth.The moment is captured; one moment of euphoria; freedom; the young soul trying to capture life, and transcend the world; ecstasy.These moments pass us by; we aren't always aware...we worry a lot, but there are some moments where life becomes an ecstasy experience; where we lose ourselves in the magnificent chaos, and life freely, and happily.The beauty of life....Abstract frames Lone figures, focused; backgrounds are blurredSilence.....Though in life there is the darkness, and depression; but without darkness, we would not know the beauty.Long shots, tackle and mirror the nature of time; our uncomfortable, and somber; melancholy; dismal; sorrowful moments. Endless, but eventually they will end.We trap ourselves in the toxic situations; couples are trapped in limbo; why do we torture ourselves? Do we enjoy it? We surround ourselves in madness and sadness, however terrible.The voice in our head; we replay our moments.The dark undergrowth is shown; but it does not have to be; perhaps the answer lies in front of us, in our grasp; yet we don't see it. The repetition of life...Happy Emotional Silent despair..Confused longing...The transitions, that represent the time between the situations faced each day; like time between bodies.Colours; blurred lines; visionsAbstract; framesThe musical motif that represents life's intoxication; exhilaration and elation; dreamlandMagic realism That we sometimes attain in life...Melt and vanishThe nature of time.....

I really loved this movie. Many people didn't and I really understand why : it's a very slow movie. Everything takes time, everything is long and you don't really see where the director really wants to go. He follows this girl. She appears to us at the beginning at the film, walking in a very long corridor, in a slow motion and on pop music. As this girl is impersonated by Shu Qi, she is absolutely beautiful. This girl smokes, she seems a little bit sad and you don't really know what is her story. The voice of a girl tells you about the relationships this girl had in the past and this voice says that, when she speaks, it's in 2010 (ten years later after when the action takes place). You never really understand why this voice says that. You never really understand what this girl wants and what is her past (although you have some informations during the film), you just see her live and it's absolutely fascinating and hypnotic. It's hard to say but you see how much Hou Hsia Hsien is fascinated by beauty, time and modern life. His fascination for time is also present in "Three Times". In this movie, everything is normal, nothing is spectacular and incredible (about the plot, the sets or whatever) but everything is poetic, mysterious and hypnotic. It's the kind of feeling you have when you see someone and you don't know why, but this person fascinates you. It's the same kind of feeling. It's fascinating as when you see someone's life and just let this person free to do what she wants, you just look at this person. It's a very good movie although fascination is something very personal.

In a revealing interview included on the DVD, Hou Hsiao Hsien says he wanted "Millennium Mambo" to be a picture of Taipei night life and also "much more," a "multifaceted" film with "multiple points of view" that he would have liked to make six hours long; something post-modern and deconstructed and free-form and improvised, but "modernist" too in some aspects.The actual film isn't so much multifaceted or plot less as it is a portrait in the moment of a few people composed, with a voice-over from ten years later, from the point of view of a pretty middle-class girl called Vicky (The bee-sting-lipped, doe-eyed Qi Shu, who also stars in the present-day chapter of Hou's recent "Three Times") who's stuck in a dysfunctional relationship with a spoiled, also pretty, middle-class boy, the bleached-haired Hao Hao (Chun-hao Tuan), who does drugs and hits on Vicky when she least wants to be hit on and who won't work and, as Vicky's omnipresent voice-over tells us, at one point has stolen his dad's Rolex and pawned it for a lot of money. They live together and hang out at clubs and Vicky works at a bar as a "hostess," a euphemism for a lap dancer who does drugs and drinks with customers and probably has sex with them -- like Liang Ching (Annie Shizuka Inoh) the actress-narrator of Hou's 1995 "Good Men, Good Women." Vicky's bar job gets her involved with an older gangsterish man named Jack (Jack Kao, the actress Liang Ching's dead lover in "Good Men")."Millennium "Mambo" doesn't show us Taipei nightlife in any collective or panoramic sense. It shows us -- a few times -- the hazy corners of a few bright clubs with little crowds of attractive young people playing games and doing drugs and alcohol, and it shows us -- many times -- corners of the apartment where Vicky and Hao Hao live, and bits of a mountain town in Hokkaido, Japan where Vicky goes, invited initially by a couple of boys she meets.Atypically for Hou, the camera moves around quite a bit too in this film, following the people and hugging their faces and bodies -- but also lingering, in his old style, statically observing doorways, walls, light fixtures, or windows with a train going by outside. Many cigarettes are lit, many are smoked. Meth is puffed in a pipe. Hao Hao pouts. Vicky looks sad or angry. The couple break up, but Vicky comes back, or Hao Hao comes after her. It's approach/avoidance: he tells her she's from another planet, but he keeps getting her back. Jack is an oasis for Vicky; but at a crucial time in winter when she goes to Japan, he isn't available, leaving her a key and a cell phone, to wander the streets. She lies in bed. She stares out the window. In a long outtake on the DVD about her Japan sojourn, Jack actually calls her and she's got a cold. In the final cut, he never calls, and she remains healthy. What's left isn't much, though as always for Hou and for many Chinese directors, the visuals are lush and beautifully lit, even if the frames are empty and the plot line, though never absent as his interview promises, goes nowhere. "Millennium Mambo's" reference to the end of the millennium (and perhaps changes in China and Hongkong?) seems, like the six-hour movie and the portrait of Taipei nightlife Hou promises in his interview, to have come to us as little more than the pretty but empty fragments of a vague, lost intention. This is a remake of Antonioni's "L'Avventura," in winter, with young attractive Asians -- and Qi Shu as the new Monica Vitti -- but without the world-weariness or awareness of any sort of fading cultural heritage, and with, instead of Antonioni's haunting white noise, a nagging techno score.

A hollow life is observed clinically but sympathetically in this melancholy, graceful film, which is itself hollow but compelling, like the dance beat it is set to. The director uses a convention I hadn't seen since early silent films: a summary description of an action, followed by its acting out. Also, the story is narrated from a time yet to come. These devices create the sense that the events have happened before--as they have, in the cyclical, purposeless life we are witnessing--and also that they are inevitable. The story is narrated in the voice of the leading character, but in the third person: an older self from a real future? or an alternate reality? or only her imagination? The narration is necessary as a comment on the characters' behavior because in the numb and mindless hedonism that draws them in and keeps drawing them (she keeps leaving the boyfriend who embodies this life style but keeps returning to him) they are never shown as capable of thought. Whether the film means to say that, or is simply limiting its view and depth of field to exclude their thoughts as peripheral to their lives, this lack works to unconvince us. The characters are shown in attitudes of thought but never speak anything like a thought, even a stupid one; they are moved entirely by want and impulse. The hedonist boyfriend is shown as having friends; how? Nobody not brain-dead exists in a state of pure mindlessness. That is the view of parents whose adolescent refuses to talk to them: who can understand these kids? This film describes a life--and this is an interesting accomplishment, but a relatively narrow one. More difficult, in this milieu, and ultimately more interesting would have been to discover the person whose life it is (or will have been).