Ray Pride

Hou Hsiao-hsien's "Millennium Mambo" opened in New York on New Year's Eve 2003, and it's only making it to Chicago now, despite its year 2000 origins. Still, it seems like ancient history and yet completely present tense. After seeing it at the 2001 Chicago International, I've watched the opening sequence-shot of this surreally beautiful masterpiece dozens of times on a Hong Kong VCD from Toronto's Chinatown. While the movie's narcotic rhythms and repetitions and sudden bursts of beauty, in composition, music, gesture and perspective, are gratifying throughout, the opening is what stays. The entire movie is there: a voiceover from a character we never see situates the story we are about to witness at the turn of the new century while we watch, in ever-so-slowed motion, impossibly pillow-lipped model-actress Qu Shi running along a pedestrian walkway, practically skipping, aware of the camera as it slinkily Steadicams behind her, turning her head, flinging her long, black hair, smiling slightly at our witness as we are told the story took place long, long ago, yet we are in this fleeting moment, this present of youthful feminine beauty while the movie's low-key techno theme begins to pulse. She does skip, down stairs at the end of the shot, the camera staying at its higher perspective, and the instant she is about to leave the frame? A cut to black and the simmering apparition of the main title in English. A lifetime packed into one shot of a woman in her youth, smiling, smoking, laughing, skipping, disappearing. 119m. "Millennium Mambo" opens for a week at the Siskel Film Center Friday. (2004-04-14)

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