Music Video
The music video was directed by Laurent Boutonnat, and the screenplay of this Requiem Publishing and Stuffed Monkey production was written both by Mylène Farmer and Boutonnat. Some fans worried that the video would be the continuation of "C'est une belle journée", which was considered irrelevant given the quite different themes of both songs. As the song had several Oriental sonorities, several rumors about the video were divulged in the media, saying it would be filmed in Morocco during the singer's vacations in September 2002. The video was eventually shot in two days in Stains, France, and cost about 40,000 euros, making it one of the singer's least expensive videos. It features a horse, which gallops on a treadmill to give the impression that it does not move forward, and a snake, which belongs to Farmer, both of which were bought in Morocco.
The video was produced in black and white and deals with religion. It features Farmer, dressed as a nun, praying and sometimes performing a dance, surrounded by white smoke. Technically, the video is built on a rapid acceleration of images showing Farmer alternating with images of a closely filmed snake and of a mysterious knight on horseback whose running is accelerating throughout the video. During the refrain, Farmer begs forgiveness with a smoky light coming from above, the display alternating between white eyes and snake-like eyes.
In this video, "Boutonnat seems to sum up the features of Farmer's imagery: total harmony between photography, editing, and sound, but also haunting images at the expense of the narrative, like moments which are thrown on their own ambiance (...). The absence of colors and landscapes, and the several close ups inspire melancholy, almost dread. This feeling is accentuated by certain images of the singer engaged in an epileptic choreography, pretending to struggle in a smoke". Several elements of the video refer to visual effects already used in many of Farmer's previous videos: black and white ("À quoi je sers..."), eyes rolled upwards ("Tristana"), a snake ("Sans logique"), a moon ("Ainsi soit je..."), a horse through a cloud of smoke ("Allan"), some moving sails ("L'Âme-stram-gram"), a smoky camera ("Beyond My Control"), and a succession of zooms and close ups ("Maman a tort"). Thus, many observers saw in these references a conclusive aspect to this video and a summary of the singer's work, like "À quoi je sers..." (which featured characters from many of her earlier videos), 13 years earlier. In spite of these symbolic aspects, the music video was not greatly appreciated by the public because it was considered "too simple and too bland". Rigal deemed the video "aesthetic".
Read more about this topic: Pardonne-moi
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