Credits
Client: Perrier
Agency: Ogilvy Paris
Director: Johan Renck
CONCEPT: The almost two minute video features a young brave and beautiful women. She seems to be the center of attention. It turns out, that she is an astronaut - maybe an android, who is being sent on a mission to the Sun. The Sun is so hot, that it is of special importance that she be sent to it . So she goes there and cools it down with a drop of Perrier water.
MY INTERPRETATION: She gazes at the sun and then pulls out her lipstick as it bleeds upon her hand, to me this is a segway that correlates the heat of “the sun” with the suffering of “the son”. From the very beginning of the video there are various images for the sun. Pictured even on the gate of an opulent estate is a sun of a more medieval design with what looks like an eye in the centre of it. Upon entering the mansion she is starred at by every aristocrat of every race and ethnicity, an expectation of some kind is at hand. She’s dressed in a golden suit, and colour is always significant when trying to understand symbolism. Gold is always synonymous wealth, more importantly the gold standard, which is becoming no longer the standard that backs the world’s financial systems. She’s holding a rather interesting helmet with some kind of embroidery on it, as she’s making her way to an “eye shaped” space craft. The craft itself has launchers on each side, that each look like smaller eyes, with the larger capsule in the middle (the third eye) and this eye gets launched into outer space (perhaps an astral projection). She takes off at minute 0:33 (at an angle of 33 degrees). The various nations of the world, all of them looking from the window in amazement. There’s a scene where children are playing indoors in an inflatable pool, and above the fireplace is the head of a very mysterious looking animal, a goat head or a bull perhaps. As the third eye goes to meet the sun…she awakens while stretching her arms out as if she’s been in a long sleep. The bottle of Perrier is a phallus encapsulated in a glass. She walks boldly towards the sun with the phallus in her hand…this represents a “resurrection”. She drinks from the phallus at everyone’s amazement, people are fainting at the sight of this act because she is taking what’s being poured (the sign of Aquarius is now at hand). The rich are crying about this because they’re world is ending. With the last drop of water she plants a seed into the light and global warming is no longer an issue (one might argue that it was never the main issue to begin with). As everything transforms and the sun (the solar cult) is being thwarted, the world walks into another form of dominance, as the moon (the lunar cult, pictured here as the Perrier bottle cap) eclipses the sun.
