Duran Duran/Ian Emes: The Chauffeur

(copied from Letterboxd, where your proprietor is placing just about all of his film writing these days. But I'm back at the House to stash this piece, which is long and in-depth enough to warrant an entry. I'm safekeeping it here as there are self-declared movie police who regularly and arbitrarily purge music videos and similar not features from that site because "wah wah wah music videos aren't movies." Imagine being such a person, reader, and shudder. now please read on.)

THE SONG: even in the heyday of their pop reign Duran Duran, largely thru the power of keyboardist Nick Rhodes, had a foot firmly planted in the weirder musics of their time. So just as Rhodes' hero David Sylvian completed Japan's decisive turn from trash glam, ending Obscure Alternatives with a moody, downbeat instrumental "The Tenant", so did Rhodes shut nearly the rest of the band out of the studio to end their jet-setting chart-smash Rio with "The Chauffeur," a largely electronic ballad rife with moody sonic imagery. With Simon LeBon matching the song's tone with one of his darker vocal tracks and lyrics, the track brings Rio to a poetic, ambiguous close, and foreshadows the downright avant-garde territory Rhodes and LeBon would explore three years later in Arcadia.

Though the band was initially miffed to have been cut from this part of the session, the song soon became special to all of them, for a number of reasons. (The song remains a steady presence in the band's setlists, and a dark horse favorite of many a lifetime fan, this one included.) Having made enough music videos to compile an album of them, the band decided it made sense to commission a video in which none of them appeared; this song seemed a natural fit for such a clip.

THE VIDEO: Animator and fashion director Ian Emes responded to the assignment with an erotically-charged short film that, bizarrely, isn't the smuttiest thing on that album.* Shot in gorgeous black-and-white we see a woman being taken in a limousine to an underground dalliance with a girlfriend, watched longingly by her otherwise dutiful chauffeur in his rear-view mirror. Though the narrative charts its own course Emes latches hard onto the mood and sonics of the track, the ominous drones matched by abstract shots of black pearls thrumming insistently in the limousine floor. Scantily dressed as they are the women in this film never lose their artful poise, and as arch as the thing feels it maintains an engrossing intensity. And if you get on its wavelength the climactic transformation might even reduce you to tears. 

THE HISTORY: So all of the kids who snagged this album (the "young people with lots of energy" that LeBon once said were the fans DD were aiming for) wound up exposed to high-end lesbian erotica via this clip (as well as the transcendent yet as-artful-in-its-own-way smut of * = Godley & Creme's cut for the night version of "Girls on Film"). It only made us like and respect that band more; it's hard to take seriously criticisms that the band were just vapid pretty boys for teenyboppers when they were marrying their songs to imagery that was unmistakably and seriously adult. That kinda gesture is what gives a band like DD staying power - the YouTube page for the video is rife with comments from older fans now old enough to understand the mysteries within who are still captivated by the clip, and younger fans being blown away by it for the first time. I'd be astonished if it ever actually ran on MTV, and yet it remains one of the best clips that the music video age ever gave us.