Hsiao-Hsien Hou's "Millennium Mambo" Blu-ray - Shu Qi @Metrograph (Patreon)

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Hsiao-Hsien Hou's "Millennium Mambo" Blu-ray - Shu Qi @Metrograph

US: https://amzn.to/41FPstb

OUR COMPARISON:

http://www.dvdbeaver.com/film/DVDCompare7/mil-mambo.htm

"Looking at the youthful friends around me, I find that their cycle and rhythm of "birth, age, illness and death' are moving  several times faster than those of my generation. This is particularly true of young girls: like flowers, they are fading almost immediately upon blooming. the process occurs in an instant. I do not remember who said this: 'Of so many leaves drifting everywhere in the sky above us, there is but one leaf which comes to and eternal halt at the very moment of being watches persistently by us with understanding and sympathy'. With this image in mind I hope shot a movie of the story of this youthful girl."     Hsiao-hsien Hou (from the Star Files static screen of the Universe DVD)

A stylish and seductive submersion into the techno-scored neon nightlife of Taipei, Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Millennium Mambo is a much-misunderstood marvel. Presented in a stunning 4K restoration, it stars Shu Qi (The Transporter) as an aimless bar hostess drifting away from her blowhard boyfriend and towards Jack Kao’s suave, sensitive gangster. Structured as a flashback to the then-present from the then-future of 2011, it’s a transfixing trance-out of a movie, drenched in club lights, ecstatic endorphin-rush exhilaration, and a nagging undercurrent of ennui.

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Hsiao-Hsien Hou's richly textured Millennium Mambo has rootless Vicky (Hong Kong's expressive nubile Shu Qi) - a drifter, becoming a mainstay at urban dance clubs with dimly lit flashes of neon lights. She is trying, indifferently, to exit the relationship with her abusive, criminal, ex-boyfriend. Vicky is trapped by her circumstance - reflecting on it in a disparate narration voiceover that contradicts her past reality. Millennium Mambo is unique in Hou’s oeuvre, although utilizing long, slow-cinema precision documenting Vicky's potential as she recognizes her confinement by examining the role she plays in her own destiny. Fascinating. A brilliant masterpiece that I am so happy to finally have on Blu-ray. Thank you Metrograph.