Romain Gavras – Shock Therapy

Romain Gavras is not a man at all unnerved by controversy, quite conversely, it seems to fuel him. The 30-year-old French director recently created M.I.A.’s Bad Girls video, a piece which by his standards was mild in its content to say the very least. Having co-founded Kourtrajmé, the one hundred and thirty something strong art and filmmaking collective in Paris, back in 1995, Gavras has gone on to direct a number of striking music videos, a documentary about Jus†ice and a feature film starring Vincent Cassel.

Central to his style is a gritty realism within which his surreal concepts become uncomfortably visceral and worryingly believable. His video for Jus†ice’s Stress caused a stir upon its release in 2008, with its imagery of a gang of feral youth acting in an uncontrollably violent manner, raw in a nature that makes it both engaging and disconcerting. The Stress video, despite an initial backlash did pick up the best international video at the inaugural U.K. Music Video Awards whilst also scooping the cinematography award for his Last Shadow Puppets Age of Understatement

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Whilst the cinematography in the LSP video is sublime, you get the feeling with Gavras that he is far happier and indeed at his best, when he is giving you something with a raw and edgy undertone to it. From his earlier videos for Simian Mobile Disco

and DJ Mehdi respectively, this purposely unrefined subject matter was always counterbalanced with incredibly impressive aesthetic attention to detail, drawing the viewer in to a visually rich story before slapping them in the face with a harsh reality.

If Stress was Gavras’ warning shot then Born Free, his first of two videos for M.I.A. to date was his ‘AK-47 accept no substitutes’ moment, the 9 minute short about a U.S. Army team capturing and executing youths and children with ginger hair.  Yes, you read that correctly. Somewhat predictably YouTube decided that the Eddie Adams-style ending of an 11 year old, was a little too violent for their hundreds of millions of users.

Whether the very different tone of Gavras’ latest piece, M.I.A.’s middle-east-set mechanophiliac convention, Bad Girls

is the mark of a new outlook on his craft remains to be seen, but somehow I doubt it. Gavras remains the enfant terrible of the music video world and we are a little apprehensive but nevertheless intrigued to see what the unpredictable but brilliant director does next.