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Millenium Mambo AKA Qianxi Manbo
R0 - Australia - Accent Review written by and copyright: Timon Maxey & Noor Razzak (14th January 2007). |
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The Film
 The young and beautiful Vicky (Qi Shu) lives with the jealous and drug-crazed Hao Hao (Chun-hao Tuan). He is unemployed, so she supports both of them, working nights at a club. Hao Hao becomes increasingly possessive and abusive, monitoring Vicky's every move, even going so far as to sniff her body odours in order to trace her activities. Vicky can no longer endure this, so runs away and befriends the older and more mature gangster, Jack (Jack Kao), who manages the club where she works. She repeatedly bemoans to him the fact that she has no idea what to do with her life and he advises her to get a respectable job at a local coffee shop. She seems markedly averse to the idea of a regular, normal job. A trip to visit two Japanese brothers in Hokkaido shows that she is capable of enjoyment but it is clear that she is incapable of finding a situation where she can be happy. This film conveys two senses of hopelessness: one concerns Vicky and the seemingly doomed life she is trapped in, and the other is in the film's own inability to give either a clear or substantial message. It is clear that the director, Hsiao-hsien Hou, is attempting to provide some kind of insight into this 'lost' generation of drug-taking, directionless youth, but he merely provides empirical material which, incidently, is rather more conservative than it needs to be if it were to help accentuate a point. "Millennium Mambo" is more 'mood' piece than enlightening story, the 'mood' being created by the throbbing techno soundtrack, the scenes and story being divulged in mixed temporal order, and the distant nature of the character development and of the action. Vicky is wasting her life and she simply needs to extricate herself from her dark world and find a good job and trustworthy, supportive people to associate with. Happiness would ensue. There is too little humour to lift the film from its gloom, and the characters are wooden, although some credit must go to Qi Shu for making the best of the two-dimensional Vicky whom she plays. I was left non-the-wiser and feeling somewhat depressed by this film. Although the packaging states that this disc is Region 4 encoded it is actually Region 0.
Video
Presented in a widerscreen ratio of 1.78:1 this anamorphic image is quite good, but not good enough to get top marks. Overall the image is quite sharp and colors are lush and vivid especially in the confines of the night clubs with their bright neon's and black lights, in normal environments skin tones are natural and blacks are bold and true, the minor problems I had with this transfer is the prominent film grain especially noticeable in the exterior night scenes, the occasional blot of dirt was also present with minor specks on the transfer. Overall it's a rather pat transfer that suits the film quite well.
Audio
A single Dolby Digital 2.0 Surround track is included in the film's original language of Mandarin, this is where I felt the film was let down somewhat, the film has many scenes that take place in dark noisy night clubs pumping techno music and a 5.1 track would have been suitable in immersing the viewer in the world these characters sift through, instead this 2.0 Surround number only does a minimal job of it. On the other hand dialogue is clear and distortion free. Optional subtitles are included in English and I could not spot any spelling of grammatical errors.
Extras
Accent have only included a collection of bonus trailers for this release that include: - "Fallen Angels" which runs for 2 minutes 51 seconds. - "Europa" which runs for 2 minutes 35 seconds. - "Pickpocket" which runs for 1 minute 33 seconds. - "L'Argent" whcih runs for 47 seconds. - "The Trial Of Joan Of Arc" which runs for 1 minute 48 seconds.
Overall
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