Only old people go to Versailles. This is what is translated from the words of the communication department of the French palace, which granted permission to Olivia Rodrigo’s team to record in its rooms out of the “desire to inspire young people around the world to visit Versailles and consider the palace as a place of beauty and love.”
With Sofia Coppola’s ‘Marie Antoinette’ (2006) as the most obvious reference, ‘Drop Dead’ follows Olivia Rodrigo running “like an angel” through the halls of Versailles, as Kirsten Dunst did in the film and as the French queen would surely once do, since, it should be remembered, she was given in marriage by the Emperor of Austria at the age of fourteen.
The video clip, directed, as usual, by Petra Collins, is articulated as a deliberate game of temporal superpositions. It begins with a prologue with a disco feel and nineties aesthetic, in which Olivia appears dressed as the escort played by Jane Birkin in ‘Catherine et Cie’ (1975).
Next, the singer appears in the Versailles royal apartments wrapped in an aesthetic that mixes the retro – Walkman headphones, pink guitars – with the aristocratic; the historical, with the anachronistic; the regal, with the pop.
A decision that refers directly to Coppola’s visual licenses and his popist reading of Marie Antoinette (the famous pastel-colored Converse that appeared in the royal shoe rack), where eras fold over each other like a postmodern palimpsest.
