I now move from "Dear So and So" format to music video reviews for a bit. Here is Dirty South (Dragan Roganović), a Serbian-Australian DJ, with his video for "Eyes Wide Open" with Thomas Gold featuring Kate Elsworth, also Australian.
Though the song in itself is nothing extraordinary and will easily get lost in the huge amounts of electronic dance music over the next few years, the video is captivating.
It is refreshing in that it doesn't ever show the singers singing or the DJ playing. Obviously a music video usually showcases the artist, but to have the artist not directly present makes it much more cinematic and interesting. The plot is simple enough, but this interpretation could be different from what the artist intended: girl is broken-hearted, has flashback of an amazing relationship, but the relationship ends abruptly and she is alone.
The Rubik's cube, while visually stunning, especially in the parts where the color matches the color tone of the scene, is a bit confusing as a metaphor. Perhaps it talks about one's life finally coming together when love is found. We get closer and closer to putting the pieces together, but we are never fully complete until another person makes us so. However, the foreboding tone and sad face of the girl putting it together might be a symbol of attempting to put life together, or dreaming of putting it together, but not actually achieving it.
Ending with the white side could be a symbol for many things. In physics, all colors of light put together create white. Maybe it's again a symbol of all those beautiful pieces of her life coming together. On the other, the white could represent an emptiness, a blank slate, or the idea of starting over.
And maybe it just looks effing cool and there's no reason for it at all.
The nostalgic camera work at the beginning of the video is breathtaking. One can just feel the warmth of the late afternoon sun as the picture progresses. We have all been there before, feeling the grass, letting the sun set on our skin, intimately holding hands with another person. As the video picks up, it shares similarities with Calvin Harris and Rihanna's "We Found Love." The songs are similar in that they tell a flashback, a love story that came apart.
The rapid, montage editing, color correction, and close-ups make the video a thrill to watch over and over again.
