Millennium Mambo
I’ve seen this film two times before. Both times, I left it without a rating and without even marking it as watched. Both times, I cried multiple times over. Both times, I found myself rewinding it—replaying scenes over and over as I kept crying. Both times, I couldn’t… see myself. As melodramatic as it sounds, I think that I was searching for myself inside the images. I was lost, drowning in emotions I couldn’t face. Since then, I’ve been diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder.
Before this rewatch, I wouldn’t have told you that Millennium Mambo that served as a major artistic influence on me, let alone one of my favorite films of all time. I couldn’t recognize it. Despite this, right as I saw that opening shot, I felt it.
Millennium Mambo is like a brain worm that has been unconsciously informing the shots that I conceive. Intimate in the way scenes detach from their surroundings, the film’s cinematographic identity reconstructs the realist narrative into an internally-motivated experience—ridding the text from the objective gaze of other realist pieces.
The impressionist approach to the image’s composition, aided by the disjointed narrative structure, allows for Vicky’s core desire for personal freedom to control the frame.
Throughout the film, the mere presence of other bodies feels claustrophobic within the weightless haze of memory. The trajectory of the cinematic language as Vicky gradually lets go of her attachments is always in conversation with that opening shot—a lone soul joyfully drifting into the infinite.
Expressing myself has never come easily to me. I learned to communicate through others (quite literally since I’m mute). I’m an #empath 😜. I think that the reason I struggled to recognize my own connection towards this piece and the influence it has on me is rooted in this reality. The inspiration I feel from Millennium Mambo isn’t about capturing community or the lives of others. It’s about myself…. And I tend to make myself feel uncomfortable. I guess that’s something I gotta get over if I want to do this whole artist thing.