"Millennium Mambo"

However, once you get into the groove of the film's sometimes maddening slowness, you feel as if your senses have been sharpened. Hou places you at a remove from the pace of his characters' lives to allow you to observe them as closely as you can. But Hou gets himself into another kind of bind. It's one thing to resist the rapacious speed of a cannibal culture, but because the vapidness of their existence is really all there is to see of these characters, "Millennium Mambo" is, in some ways, another stylish artifact. There are no hidden depths revealed in Hou's molasses-dripping sense of time. If you put "Millennium Mambo" next to Wong Kar-Wai's "Days of Being Wild," about Hong Kong youth in the early '60s, in which the slow pace did result in revelation, "Millennium Mambo" might feel very slight.

Still, what Hou shows us has the recognizable contours of life, of people trapped in lives they have no idea how to -- and maybe not even the will to -- change. The shallowness of the characters doesn't cause you to dismiss "Millennium Mambo," because Hou never makes us feel that we are watching mere posing. Vicky may be shallow, but she's not dead. "Millennium Mambo" never falls into the chic anomie of Michelangelo Antonioni's fetishizations of the rich living dead. You never feel as if Hou is secretly coveting the emptiness he's showing us. There is compassion in his treatment of Vicky, an empathy for someone who feels and suffers but doesn't have the experience or the resources to get out of her predicament. And the combination of the thick sensuality of Mark Lee Ping-bing's cinematography and the gradual fascination that Hou's measured rhythms exert keep you watching.

Shu Qi also keeps you watching. A Hong Kong starlet who got her start in soft porn and graduated to action roles in pictures like Corey Yuen's "The Transporter" and "So Close," Shu Qi is a gorgeous camera subject. Her otherwise delicate features are given a ripeness by her prominent nose and over-generous mouth. There's no point in proclaiming her a great actress, but for the role of Vicky, she doesn't need to be. (Some of the most memorable women in Godard's movies weren't great actresses, either.) What she does need to do is to exist comfortably in front of the camera. She moves through "Millennium Mambo" like someone used to being watched, whether she's lighting a cigarette or rebuffing Hao-Hao's adolescent sexual overtures. The movie would be simply unthinkable without her star presence, and Hou's willingness to respond to her, to let the camera feast on her, to allow his observation to take on the qualities of fetishization, give the movie a glamour that otherwise would make it punishingly slow and blank.

What's more, Shu has a talent for petulant suffering. Even when Vicky is reduced to lap-dancing in some sleazy club she seems resigned to her fate. And with Jack, who becomes her protector more than her lover, and who possesses the experience and common sense that she lacks (he's a delicate sort of tough guy), she seems content to fall into the role of cared-for pet rather than taking the chance he offers her to turn her life around. But the fact that Vicky narrates in the third person, as if her earlier self were a character she can speak about with some distance, suggests that her future holds a break with this past. Her present state is as transitory as the outline of her face that she presses into a snowbank. The distance between the glimmers of dissatisfaction she shows and the ruefulness we hear in her "older" voice work to give us sympathy for the characters. And so do the privileges of beauty. Shu Qi is simply one of those luscious creatures that we go to the movies to watch, and if that sounds shallow, it's no less a fact of our moviegoing. That Hou is open to her glamour does much to make "Millennium Mambo" seem less rarefied than it could.

And Shu Qi's glamour isn't the only link here to the traditional pleasure of movies. "Millennium Mambo" ends in flashback, as Vicky and some friends wander the snowy nighttime streets of Yurabi, Japan. They are walking along Cinema Street, so named because huge movie posters adorn the top of each building, for everything from French policiers to the Japanese Tora-san series. Along with the melancholy of ending the film by showing us one of his heroine's rare moments of simple happiness, Hou evokes a longing in this scene for the very idea of movies, and perhaps for the idea of movies he loves but knows he can't make.

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