LOVE / HATE

Personally, I think this writing rhythm works better in his music videos than in his features. In a short format, the breaks, ellipses and abandoned ideas become energy. An image arrives, hits hard and disappears before it has to explain itself. In a feature, I inevitably expect the story to hold together as well as the images, and that is often where I start to lose interest.

That is exactly what happens to me with Sacrifice, his latest film on Netflix. It has everything I like about Gavras: the casting, the crowds, the scale, the humour, the mythology and that way of creating images that already seem iconic. But it also has everything that annoys me, with the feeling that an idea can be abandoned as soon as it has produced a beautiful shot.

Maybe that is why Storm works so well. The video is dense enough to suggest an entire world, but short enough never to have to explain it.

Before sweeping the UKMVAs, Storm had already picked up VMA nominations for Video of the Year, Best Direction and Best Choreography — and its second half was restaged live in a blistering remake of the video.

Looking at the winners, I still think it is a shame that the most creative videos are not better represented. There is plenty of craft and plenty of beautiful imagery, but it lacks a little madness and design, even in Newcomer & Low Budget. At times, it is hard to tell whether I am watching a music video or an ad and, if that were the only problem, the music often leaves me with the same feeling.

Something is not quite right with the music video at the moment. In Europe, the industry sometimes feels almost moribund. I thought the arrival of AI would trigger an explosion, with a strange, cobbled-together and cheap revival of the format, but so far it has been more of a plouf. Or maybe it is simply still too early.