The video clip that illustrates ‘I’m Your Girl Right?’, the first preview of Tove Lo’s album ‘ESTRUS’, begins almost like a chapter of ‘The Testaments’. Young people uniformed and disciplined through instruction and obedience, in an ecclesiastical and barracks environment (the clip is shot in Brazil, in an old monastery on the outskirts of Sao Paulo), as if it were a boarding school in Gilead or any theocratic dictatorship.
But a little love note in the dining room is enough for the established order to be blown up like Zapatero’s reputation. The emergence of desire acts like a virus that infects this ecosystem of repression, transforming obedience into drive and submission into liberation. Suddenly, we go from the dystopian puritanism of ‘The Testaments’ to the dancing eroticism of Guadagnino’s ‘Suspiria’ or the bodily delirium of ‘Climax’, by Gaspar Noé.
The great value of the clip is that it narrates this transformation almost exclusively through the body and the staging: the lights change, the editing speeds up, the frames stop being geometric, and the dance abandons martial rigidity to surrender to an anarchic and contagious sensuality. The visual discipline of the boot decomposes at the same pace as the moral order it represents: where before there was symmetry, control and obedience, chaos, desire and a kind of collective liberation erupt.
