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.

GIRLS ON FILM (long uncensored version + short censored version)

The band made two versions of this video: one (for the 12" dance remix) "tastefully smutty" to cause a stir and get noticed in nightclubs, the other (for the 7" version) sensuous but relatively tame for safer venues (MTV hadn't launched when the video was made). We teenagers weaned on MTV saw the latter version, but though we were too young for the clubs, we were well aware of the former. Though Duran Duran came up through the late 70s postpunk scene in the UK, their first three albums and the attendant videos all seemed to hit the States at about the same time, and though the "tastefully smutty" GIRLS ON FILM clip was intended for adults-only venues, the sheer ubiquity of early Duran product being foisted on US fans meant that it was easy to find. I suspect most of my teenaged peers either borrowed an older sibling's copy or rented it from an unwary clerk at a video rental shop (which is how I eventually caught up with it). Everyone who grew up on Duran Duran knows both versions, which leads me to believe that there were other pre-teen or teen fans for whom seeing the video was something of a rite of passage. It was intended for nightclubs and pay TV networks like the nascent Playboy Channel, but since the band were for "young people with lots of energy" (per Simon LeBon's words), did they really expect we wouldn't seek it out?


Fig. 1 - "tastefully smutty"

After recently re-watching both versions of the video, I was struck less by the vintage erotica (lovingly itemized here) as by the intersecting levels of fantasy and reality. The long version of the clip begins with a minute of behind the scenes footage (with stagehands building the set, artists making up the band) mixed with footage of the band performing. We're taken back and forth between the preparation, the "performance", and the various erotic scenarios that unfold in front of the band. Flashbulbs pop off from cameras wielded both by photographers and actors playing photographers. The video often serves as a document of the making of itself, and the artful and efficient dismantling of the line between the levels of fantasy and reality suggest that directors Godley and Creme have perhaps absorbed some Jacques Rivette as well as Tinto Brass.


Fig. 2 - is the POV here real or fake?

To your proprietor's considerable surprise, this aspect of the video is even more sharply prevalent in the "safe", short version, which ends with a small debutante party unfolding in the ring before the band. As a masked gentleman stands unnervingly still, two glitzily dressed couples take the stage, dance to the final verse, then retire to the offstage area for cocktails, where one of the women forcefully kisses a t-shirt-and-jeans clad stagehand who's seen throughout both versions. A quick shot of the band breaks up the progression, but it's not enough to indicate a passage from video-time to real-time, and the effect is a startling crossover of onstage desire to the backstage realm. Though the artsmut of both versions is what they're remembered for, it's this surprisingly sophisticated ballet of lust and fantasy that gives the video its real oomph, and keeps the clip feeling fresh even thirty years after its making.

Coda - GIRLS ON FILM is neither the band's best video nor their sexiest, but it was the first video with which they reached out to catch the music video wave that they would ride to world wide fame. This early body of work played before my eyes at a time when I was just understanding what film could do, and just as Duran Duran's music suggested the weirder places that music could go, these videos (particularly the clips by Russell Mulcahy) helped form my understanding of how films were made. All told for now.