While we've been rather fixated on the Alex de la Iglesia retrospective running at Toronto's TIFF Bell Lightbox right now - as we should be, being that we're presenting it - there's plenty of other good stuff going on there, too. Such as? How about a lengthy retrospective of the films of Taiwanese auteur Hou Hsiao-hsien? That series is going on right now, too,
with a screening of his classic Millennium Mambo hitting the big screen on March 1st at 6:30 pm. And we've got a pair of tickets to give away!
Hou's In the Mood for Love, Millennium Mambo captures
the sheer weightlessness, the inertia and amnesia of life in
contemporary Taipei by focusing on free-spirited bar hostess Vicky (Hong
Kong diva Shu Qi) as she floats into the new millennium, seemingly
unfettered by work, love, or family. Following Vicky as she drifts from
night to night, club to club, Ecstasy and techno fuelling and flattening
her abandon, Hou foregoes his stately rhythms and formal tableaux for
the throbbing, spectral beat of rave music and a nervously roving,
claustrophobic camera, which uses an 85mm lens to brings things so close
that they can be blurred, obscured, or oddly cropped, rendering Vicky's
neon-lit world chaotic and indecipherable. (Hou describes the visual
approach, devised with genius cinematographer Mark Lee Ping-bin, as that
of a microscope.) Less atypical of Hou than it first appears, Millennium Mambo
is a ghost story, but what has died is more than a single soul -- voided
of history, memory, a sense of being and belonging, there seems to be
no consolation in this "city of sadness." Braver and more beautiful than
many contemporary films, Millennium Mambo is an extraordinary experience: by turns irritating, hypnotizing, maddening, and moving.
For your chance to win, just
email me here and name another film by Hou that starred Shu Qi. Winner will be drawn at random.