Hou’s first film of the current century is a dazzling, small-scale sketch that arguably takes his and cinematographer Mark Lee Ping-Bin’s established minimalism to a new peak of sensual indulgence. The collaboration came a year after Ping-Bin’s work on In the Mood for Love and shares that film’s pervasive sense of metropolitan melancholy and romantic disaffection, albeit expressed in Hou's distinctly relaxed, ambling register. Immersed largely within the dim glow of Taipei nightlife and featuring a sobering late-stage shift to a snowy Japanese countryside, Millennium Mambo takes on the form of a series of imperfectly recalled memories from the vantage point of ten years by a drifting young woman reflecting on her failed relationships with go-nowhere men. Less a narrative than a loose template within which to place a ravishing Qi Shu amidst swirls of hazy neon, Hou’s film is a beautifully sustained mood piece that represents a gentle precursor to the urban ennui of Three Times’ final chapter.