flâneur

Lost in the World with Millennium Mambo - by Esmé Holden

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"Millennium Mambo is still as vivid and alive as it has ever been."

A disembodied voice, it sounds like Shu Qi’s, looks back on the turn of the 21st century and on Vicky, the character she plays in Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Millennium Mambo but only distantly refers to as “her”, from ten years in the future. But even at that remove and in retrospect she doesn’t find much order. At some point Vicky’s life slipped into a spiral and the only thing that gives it some kind of centre is that she’s spiralling around Hao-Hao (Tuan Chun-hao), the empty and abusive boyfriend that she always finds herself returning to “as if under a spell, or hypnotised”. In one scene she’s…

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