Ten Thousand Things

"Ten Thousand Things" is a Buddhist expression representing the dynamic interconnection and simultaneous unity and diversity of everything in the universe.

Millennium Mambo: A Contemporary Transnational Narrative
Posted by Jean, August 14, 2005

I just saw Millennium Mambo, the 2001 film by Hou Hsiao-hsien, a Taiwanese New Wave director.

Hou created half Taiwanese-half Japanese brothers, Jun and Ko Takeuchi, in Taipei, who invite Vicky, the heroine to visit their grandmother's home in Yubari, Hokkaido. Their obachan needs their help because she runs an inn that becomes crowded during the annual film festival (a real-life film festival). This village evokes powerful lyrical energy and was also the site for a 1977 Japanese film called Yellow Handkerchief of Happiness, (Shiawase-no Kiroi Hankachi).

Hou's film depicts border crossings between people at the level of everyday life. He was influenced by Japanese director Yasujiro Ozu, a master at depicting the profundity of simply living and being. This aesthetic sense comes across especially in Hou's Hokkaido scenes which are stunning – snowball fights in the cloudy late afternoon light; luminous winter night scenes with lighted billboards and street lamps against a dark blue sky; the brothers and Vicky gathered around Obachan cooking oden with the steam rising around her.

As a tribute to Ozu, Hou situated and shot his next film, Cafe Lumiere, in Japan and cast a Taiwanese-Japanese singer, Yo Hitoto, as the heroine. This film depicts more than border-crossings between Taiwan and Japan – it follows the lives of culturally mixed Japanese, past and present. Hou also subtly treats colonial and post-colonial historical issues with a small and human focus, but only as they directly touch upon the lives of his protagonists.

Yoko, a freelance writer becomes friends with the proprietor of a secondhand bookstore, Hajime (Tadanobu Asano) and the two spend a great deal of time together in coffee shops. One day Yoko tells her parents that she is pregnant. The father of the child is Taiwanese.

Perhaps the most fascinating character in this film is the real-life musician whom Yoko is researching in the film. Jiang Wenye, was renowned in Japan throughout the 1930's and 1940's. Born in Taiwan with Japanese nationality and married to a Japanese aristocrat, he left both behind to move to Beijing in 1939, to embrace traditional Chinese music. Because of historic turmoil that was the overwhelming backdrop of his life, he experienced reversals of fortunes (he sympathized with, then turned against the Japanese takeover – resulting in hardships when the Japanese were in control – then again with the Chinese Communists who jailed him briefly – then again during the 1957 Anti-Rightist Movement). Many of his compositions were fusions of the European music and the Chinese music he increasingly loved . He passed away in Beijing in 1983.

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