Normally, you'll watch a movie and know if you liked it or not afterwards. Either it left you cold, or it engaged you emotionally. In fact, commercial movies are designed to trigger that emotional response above everything else. You are supposed to get involved with the happenings depicted on screen. You're supposed to hate or love the ficticious characters, and to share their artificially enlarged emotions in some cathartic symbiosis with the actors on screen. If you don't, that's normally the sign of poor craftsmanship on the part of the director or actor, and you walk away disappointed for having wasted your time on a bad movie.

So what do you say about a movie that deliberately keeps you at a distance? That shuts you out, both emotionally and intellectually? Hou Hsiao-hsien's films use this approach intentionally, and while I don't know enough about the director to understand whether he does this as part of a formulated aesthetic plan or merely out of personal bias, I can say it makes for a challenging viewing experience. How much viewers get out of this experience depends on a number of factors. His approach worked well, I thought, in Flowers of Shanghai, because the subject matter itself was so strong that adding a layer of objective distance actually sharpened the focus. In Millennium Mambo, on the other hand, there's very little substance to begin with.

The story is essentially a chamberpiece revolving around a young woman and two men in her life. Scenes alternate in seemingly random fashion between brief intermezzos in various nightclubs, and petty squabbles and daily routines in their apartment at home. The central character, Vicky (Shu Qi), is a directionless young woman caught in a possessive, controlling relationship with an equally lost young man called Hao Hao (Tuan Chun-Hao). They fight, they argue, they boil some noodles, they use the bathroom, they smoke and drink. That's about it. Nothing else happens. No detectable plot or story arch forms out of these little slices of life. The scenes remain vignettes, signifying nothing in particular, and acted in a restrained, almost improvised style. Eventually, Vicky does leave Hao Hao and ends up shacking at a friend's place (Jack Tao), who's a triad. Again, none of this rises to the levels of actual story-telling. Nothing but little vignettes, including two unexplained trips to Japan that seem to have been included only because Hou Hsiao-hsien wanted to show the snow in Hokkaido as a visual metaphor for -- well, I don't know what for, but it does sure look pretty...

The camera basically stays mounted on a tripod throughout the film, and restricts itself to panning left or right, with an occasional zoom. No jerky handheld weaving and bobbing, no distorting filters and lenses (take that, Chistopher Doyle!), remaining a neutral observer for the most part. It does manage to create some interesting imagery, primarily through color composition and though playing with focus.

The acting is unobtrusive and restrained, in line with the overall aesthetic approach of the film. And it's also the one saving grace the film has. If it weren't for Shu Qi, there'd be little to recommend in this movie. She does hold the film together with a strong performance that shows how good an actress she has become these last few years, and how much her range has broadened, displaying subtle yet intense and authentic expressions that are light years removed from the bimbo roles she has been confined to so often in HK. Shu Qi acts as the film's narrator, referring in the sparse voiceovers to herself in the third person and in the past tense, again keeping the audience at a distance. I still have no clue what Hou Hsiao-hsien was trying to get at here - if he was zooming in on the floating, directionless, hedonistic and sad perspective of underprivileged young adults in Taipei, then he did so in the most superficial way. The movie's narrator keeps referring to the millennium, so perhaps the film does indeed try to evoke some sort of fin de siecle atmosphere of a generation lost somewhere between rave parties and unemployment, but the movie captures none of the passion or spontaneity of being young, and does not go far enough in illustrating the feeling of hopelessness and being caught in something you cannot escape from. The film's events remain far too inconsequential for that. So I still don't know if Vicky is meant to signify anything other than allowing the director to shed the stiff period setting of his previous film and indulge in some more cool-looking visuals.

If you fell asleep watching Flowers of Shanghai, if you thought WKW's Fallen Angels was pretentious crap, if you ever posted a message on the Internet asking for recommendations concerning Shu Qi's nudie flicks, and if the last three movies you truly enjoyed were either directed by Andrew Lau or produced by Wong Jing, then stay a mile away from this film. For everyone else, I'd say watch it and decide for yourself. I don't know if I liked it, but I did spend time afterwards thinking about it quite a bit, so to that extent the movie did engage me after all, I guess...