Watch this, will you? I can't stop.
I know nothing about the artist (Jessie Ware) or her song ("Step Into My Life") or this dancer (Eric Schloesser). The tab has been open so long I can not recall the algorithmic alchemy that brought me to it and left me exhilarated.
His face. Its high-angled cheekbones. Deep-set hooded eyes. Joaquin Phoenix's mullet from To Die For, but make it fashion. The fluid drape and sickly color of the slightly oversized jacket. The break of his dark blue trousers. Those shoes.
Then there're the long takes and low angles of the camera, starting with the shoes, moving up and out, creating a rhythm and indulging a bit of bricolage business on the benches. All that blows apart at the chorus, leaving us lying on the ground, looking up at this sullen, whirling colossus. The camera stills, letting him dance out of the frame without following. Disco strings and horns and bass and lewd pews surge up as the bridge returns us to the first shots, but runs them backwards and forwards, the dancer leaping and spinning and flipping and sliding until the chorus again intervenes. He brings a bright green bowling ball to his lips, kisses it, taking the sacrament of Jesus-les-pins. Illogical unmotivated cuts abound.
The camera faces him from the lane, revealing the previously unseen reverse of the alley, a blip of blue. And then it comes, at 3:14, with 20 seconds left. A smirk breaks the straight line of his lips on one side only. Perfection. The camera catches a vapor and reacts with a series of super short shots as he bowls.
Does he strike? No idea. The camera abandons the 180-degree rule altogether as he turns away, starting again from his shoes and backing up and out into a wide shot, his body blocking our view as he slouches toward us, hands in pockets. The final two shots eschew matches on action almost entirely. Returning to the eternal return of brightly colored balls for the fourth and final time here, the crouched-down Stedicam rises up on its knees as he dances out of frame in the background. Cut. The camera gazes down from the ceiling like a mirror ball as the dancer slides into disco home plate. Take that, baseball, he's safe: a prone pietà . His back-arched body and splayed fingers cut across the strict verticals of the floorboards on the bias. The music stops.
It's so good. Yes, the video does invoke Christopher Walken in Fatboy Slim's Spike Jonze-helmed "Weapon of Choice." But it shows off not with traveling mirror shots but in the modesty of its setting. There's something, too, to this solitary dancer's line, often seen from exceedingly low angles, that recalls Chris of Christine and the Queens in "Tilted," although they tend more toward dancing ensemble.
Close tab.
