Director: Robin Ellis Lee
Running time: 3mins
At a brisk two minutes and 55 seconds, Robin Ellis Lee scarcely had the blink of an eye to make a visual impact with this music video. But over the course of Luci Rain’s track Fong La, the director manages to construct a visceral and evocative world, that pairs seamlessly with the song itself.
From the beginning to the end, we are told an ambiguous story, in which the performer is given full license to toy with us. While historically, music videos promoting work from women have tended to focus on commodifying the artist’s body, Lee’s story flips that antiquated tradition on its head.
At first, when we are introduced to Rain, she seems to be ordained for some kind of cultish ceremony. After being selected for purposes unknown, she reluctantly approaches a pedestal with a full moon overhead. Here, it seems as though Lee’s imagery is leaning into convention, presenting the artist as an objectified article of desire – with surrounding cultist dancers waving and grasping at her expectantly. But as the ceremony progresses, she takes ownership of the situation, and ends the piece seemingly revealing herself as a puppet-master, now completely in control of those who initially seemed to be laying claim to her.
As the lyrics, in Mandarin and English, seem to play with this concept – both locating Rain as prey and predator at certain points – it gives a polished and tightly-choreographed affair that might have felt a little too produced a deliciously frisson of eerie uncertainty. It invites viewers to feel like we have just stepped into a beautifully crafted spiders web – leaving the audience to think about the assumptions we brought into this silken palace, while our fate hangs in the balance.
Beyond the sumptuous use of lighting, and gorgeous bursts of colour that interlace the production, the framing of almost every image has clearly been exhaustively considered, too – something which is really important when trying to build a fresh narrative around a song, without simply parroting or contradicting its original meaning.
The only thing that minorly lets things down is that one or two wide-shots slightly undermine the grandeur we are being invited to believe in. While everything looks reassuringly expensive on the great floor of the temple that the dancers writhe and flow across, several cavernous wide shots do reveal there aren’t that many of them. It might have been an idea to keep the camera a little tighter on the action, then, as I often needed to do back in my days organising and filming protest events nobody wanted to attend. Sometimes, you need to make yourself look bigger than you actually are – and situating your attendees in the middle of a big empty room does the opposite of that.
Perhaps that fits, because this is only the start of Rain’s journey, and maybe she plans on ensnaring more followers in the near-future. But as it stands now, her supposedly otherworldly powers don’t seem to have impacted a great enough number of people, to make the fluctuation of influence on screen as ominous as it should be for the patriarchal order.
I could say that this is the best music video we’ve received at Indy Film Library – but if you’ve been following the category closely in the last few years, that would be damning it with faint praise. It comes close to being the perfect accompaniment to its musical source material – complementing it, while finding ways to build upon it. It’s just a shame that, for whatever reason, it isn’t publicly accessible at present – which seems slightly antithetical for a film produced to promote the song of an emerging musical artist.