Music Video
Chris Robinson directed the song's accompanying music video and filmed in Mexico, during November 2002. June Ambrose was hired as the personal stylist, and Lance Reddick appears in the video as the main police officer on their tail. Jay-Z and Knowles play a modern-day version of the 1920s bank robbers Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker. The video is loosely based on the American 1993 romance crime film True Romance, which stars Christian Slater and Patricia Arquette as two lovers on the run from cocaine dealers. The choreography used in the clip suggests a relationship beyond screen, as Jay-Z wraps his arm around Knowles while singing his part of the chorus. The video also marked a departure for the "clean-cut Knowles" and created a symbiotic relationship between her and Jay-Z, allowing them to exchange audiences.
The music video begins as police officers and Reddick discuss the criminal duo and ways to catch them. As the song begins, Jay-Z is seen driving a gunmetal grey Aston Martin while Knowles sits in the passenger seat. As they drive through the sepia sands of Mexico, clips of the police from the beginning of the video are cut into the scene. As Jay-Z and Knowles pull over to a hotel, they cover the car to avoid notice from the police. As Knowles and Jay-Z count money in the bedroom, the police discover their hiding place and go upstairs only to find that the two have fled the scene in their car. Scenes of Knowles and Jay-Z at a Mexican bar are inter-cut with scenes of an intimate time in a phone-booth; behind the phone booth, spray-painted onto a wall is a tribute to Tupac Shakur. The duo again elude the police who are following one step behind. After Knowles performs her verse in an empty pool, the police form a blockade on the highway in an attempt to catch her and Jay-Z, only to be stumped again as two gas station attendant decoys are found driving the car. The video ends as Knowles and Jay-Z light a bonfire on the beach and drive away in a different car.
Corey Moss of MTV News noted that the end of the video does not reveal how the "real" Bonnie and Clyde met their end. The story continues in the 2004 video for Jay-Z's song "99 Problems". The music video for "'03 Bonnie & Clyde" was nominated for Best Hip-Hop Video at the 2003 MTV Video Music Awards. In the official top 20 countdown of Jay-Z music videos, MTV UK listed the clip at number 10.
Read more about this topic: '03 Bonnie & Clyde
Famous quotes containing the words music and/or video:
“I’ve come close to matching the feeling of that night in 1944 in music, when I first heard Diz and Bird, but I’ve never got there.... I’m always looking for it, listening and feeling for it, though, trying to always feel it in and through the music I play every day.”
—Miles Davis (1926–1991)
“These people figured video was the Lord’s preferred means of communicating, the screen itself a kind of perpetually burning bush. “He’s in the de-tails,” Sublett had said once. “You gotta watch for Him close.””
—William Gibson (b. 1948)