Early dismissal. - Cannes Review 2001 - movie review

Film Comment, July-August, 2001 by Gavin Smith

Expectations inevitably run too high whenever a great filmmaker unveils the follow-up to an artistic triumph. Such was the case with Hou Hsiao-hsien's Millennium Mambo, coming three years after Flowers of Shanghai, and saddled with a Wong-Kar-wai-ish title. By Hou's standards, it's minor. But even a minor Hou Hsiao-hsien film stands head and shoulders above just about everything else around, even in Cannes, where it screened on the final morning of the festival.

Millennium Mambo can be understood as a contemporary companion piece to Flowers, just as oblique and just as hermetic, but set in the contemporary urban nightclub-bar-apartment milieu of Goodbye South, Goodbye. The film's defining image is the impression of a face left in a snowbank during a winter mountain interlude, an evocation of ephemerality that is sure to endure and resonate long after many entire films have faded from memory. Hou and his perennial scenarist Chu Tien-wen continue to refine their narrative minimalism in this story of a young bar hostess (the exquisite Shu Qi) who gradually shifts her sympathies from her jealously possessive DJ boyfriend to an empathetic middle-aged gangster (Hou regular Jack Kao). It's easy to mistake Hou's work here for something lax and self-indulgent: a mise-en-scene grounded in open-ended shots of extended duration in which a fixed, seemingly listless camera pans to cover the banal interactions and violent outbursts of characters who appear to be little more than ciphers. But as in all of Hou's films, there's nothing casual about Millennium Mambo. The new film shares with its predecessors a commitment to a very specific form of patient attention to the world, to what's in front of the camera. The mise-en-scene in Millennium Mambo is tense as could be if you're attuned to nuance, and Hou's discreet, unforced visual sensuality transforms his minimalism into something mesmerizing. There's an extraordinarily submerged quality to this film, with its dark spaces, saturated fluorescent colors, dreamy shifting light patterns, and slowly pulsating (and jury prize-winning) soundtrack, which combines with the hungover camera style to emphatically resist the accelerated pace of modern life and wrest accumulated meaning from seemingly inconsequential events. This heightened attentiveness is further reinforced by the device of a third-person voiceover narration set ten years in the future that describes events several scenes in advance of their onscreen depiction.

Critical consensus was just as dismissive of the new films by Claire Denis and Raul Ruiz. Savage Souls (Les Ames fortes), Ruiz's literary adaptation set in rural France in 1880, is an engrossing, superior middlebrow entertainment about the steady ascent to self-determination of an opportunistic peasant girl (model Laetitia Casta) who elopes with a blacksmith, insinuates herself into the affections of a local gentleman and his wife (John Malkovich and Arielle Dombasle), and becomes a surrogate daughter to the latter. Ruiz plays things even straighter than he did in Time Regained, but in the service of far lesser material. Still, the film's retrospective narrative framework -- the film's main character as an old woman recounting her story to a group of friends in the late 1940s -- affords Ruiz a few opportunities to employ some of his trompe l'oeil effects with space and perspective, and his 'taste for the enigmatic asserts itself through a lingering sense of the unknowability of human motivation.

Denis' contemporary vampire film Trouble Every Day was maybe the most scorned of all -- makes you wonder what they put in the water in Cannes. Sure, it's no Beau travail, but so what? It has the same sharp, dexterous visuals, skillful control of tone, and adroit editing, and the same sense of narrative economy -- in fact, for two thirds of its running time it's virtually a silent film.

Vincent Gallo plays an employee of a pharmaceuticals company who comes to Paris for a honeymoon with his wife, played by Ghost Dog's Tricia Vessey. No sooner have they arrived than Gallo is off in search of a doctor (Alex Descas) with whom he had been engaged in a medical research project in Africa involving the human libido. The latter has vanished and is now pursuing his research in seclusion. Could this be connected to the fact that his wife (Beatrice Dalle) suffers from an illness that makes her crave human blood? Gallo clearly isn't feeling himself either -- apparently he's suffering from the same malady. If the material is thin, it's because Denis' main interest is in pushing the sexual dimension of the vampire myth further than ever before, and (perhaps barring Jess Franco's The Female Vampire) she succeeds. After a Slow, deliberate hourlong build, the film delivers its first payoff in a scene that has to be seen to be believed in which Dalle seduces and devours a young delinquent who has broken into the house in which she is imprisoned. And the corresponding scene in which Gallo devours his prey is guaranteed to polarize audiences.