Sunday, December 6 | 5:30 p.m.
Also like Life: the films of Hou Hsiao-hsien
An International retrospective organized by Richard I. Suchenski (Director, Center for Moving Image Arts at Bard College), in collaboration with the the Taiwan Film Institute and the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of China (Taiwan). The book Hou Hsiao-hsien (Vienna: Österreichisches Filmmuseum and New York: Columbia University Press, 2014) has been released in conjunction with this retrospective.
Looking back on her life from ten years in the future, Vicky—played by Qi Shu, the luminous star of Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s The Assassin—narrates an elliptical tale of aimless youth and doomed love set in the Taipei club scene at the dawn of the new millennium. Making ends meet as a bar hostess, she bounces back-and-forth between her possessive boyfriend Hao-Hao and her benevolent gangster-patron, Jack, searching for meaning in the space between euphoric raves and drunken fights. Although Millennium Mambo is something of a departure for Hou—a director best known for his elegant period dramas—this film retains his signature long-take style. Employing an agile moving camera and a shallow depth-of-field, the director finds delicate, abstract beauty in the neon, strobes, and black-lights that illuminate Vicky’s nocturnal world, while Lim Giong’s pulsating electronic score vacillates effortlessly between ecstasy and entropy.
Director Hou Hsiao-Hsien 2001 Taiwan/France 119 minutes R 35mm
