Thanks to Mike Hughes for bringing the video below to my attention. He describes it, “This is just so beautiful. The restaurant could only be in a Nordic country, the tristesse is beautifully expressed, and the fact that Lykke Li’s dress is reminiscent of a strait-jacket just adds to the poignancy… [This clip dramatizes what it’s like] to be on show to the world and slowly crumbling until strangers end up cheek-by-jowl with your intimate memories at the end of an affair.”
I echo his approbation. The images in this Lykke Li short tell the deepest truths. The song is fat and lovely too, loaded with catchy thrills, softening and masking the painful honesty of its imagery. (I apologize in advance for the cliché, but it is apt for Swedish motion pictures where quietly beautiful cinematography conveys cathartic emotional truth.) In an Ingmar Bergmanesque way, Tarik Saleh’s sumptuous restaurant scene condenses the pain, stiffness, turmoil and instinct to secrecy that are common ingredients of the Swede-Am experience. With English lyrics and a mid-tempo American girl group sound, this tune really cuts more Swede-Am than Swede for me. In many US families, there are rumors of murders, suicides, raging alcoholism, insanity and whatnot, all wrapped with a tight, overwhelming social and familial imperative blanket of dos and don’ts: do sit down, do be quiet and whatever you do, don’t make a scene, don’t show any excess emotion, and don’t show either approval or disapproval. As the self-victimizing video girl rebelliously drinks enough aquavit (literally, “water of life”) to poison her anorexic body, volumes are spoken. In this boozy, inelegantly-dancing sprite we see aunts, cousins, siblings, even ourselves–whoever has gone haywire and had to be gently but forcibly squeezed back into hushed silence at the dinner table of life. The handsome, reproving older man who stares at her intensely–his own memories roiling–is a piercing portrayal of the ever-present tribe, the community of continuity that quietly, and inevitably, reasserts the status quo at all costs.
The song ends with heartbeats. Blood flows through this music. Although this video is antithetical to Lykke Li’s name, which means in Swedish, “lucky,” and in Norwegian, “happy,” the title, “Sadness is a Blessing,” could be the Swede-Am motto, perhaps the Swedish national motto as well.
[Many thanks to John Markuson for his expert copy editing on this piece.]
