More Michel magic

Music videos have the potential to be the purest filmic medium of the symbolic as they are essentially music set to the pulse of imagery or imagery set to the pulse of music - a description which also intimates our sense of the poetic. This poetic sense is nowhere more apparent than in the work of Michel Gondry, in whose hands a four-minute video is transformed into a crucible of wonder. Gondry has employed the medium to hone a hand-crafted, childlike visual sensibility in which intellectual rigour is applied to playfulness in a manner reminiscent of the Oulipo writers. He is a master of the cinematic sleight of hand and his clip for Cibo Matto's "Sugar Water" is certainly one of the most beguiling videos he or anyone else has ever made. As he explains in the second clip below, it is constructed as a "visual palindrome" in which Cibo Mattto's Miho Hatori and Yuka Honda enact a fateful encounter that plays out across the mirroring panels of a diptych. The narrative of the video loops upon itself mobius strip like in its meditation of crossed destinies. And yet it is almost effortless in its synthesis of depth and levity. In a move typical of Gondry the title of the song is evoked through a tongue-in-cheek split-screen rebus: Miho showers herself in sugar while Yuka opposite showers with water, hence "Sugar Water."