April 26, 2019 |
Jealousy. You probably hate it but life would be mighty boring without that vicious thing. And apparently, award-winning literary star Bret Easton Ellis thinks so too. For the third iteration of the ongoing art project Self, Anthony Vaccarello chose Ellis to imagine his hyper-sexual world through his own lens. After Japanese photographer Daido Moriyam and Italian artist Vanessa Beecroft, the turn was on the American writer to veil the French fashion house with his creative sensibility. “The lyric kept repeating itself to me as I began shooting this short film for YSL, about jealousy and romantic obsession, the windmills of your mind being the things you project onto a neutral reality when you are trapped within the throes of desire, infatuation can often make the tactile world seem fictional, a fantasy, because it leads us down unexpected paths that don’t conform–that disrupt–our daily reality, and this feeling can be even more intense when you’re young, and so much of the world hasn’t revealed itself to you yet–its starkness, its pragmatism. A utopia is still a possibility, and the purity of love is still an option,” Ellis says of the project.
Through a homoerotic storyline and starring a pedigreed cast of Hopper Penn, Tes Linnenkoper and Dakota Lindvall, The Arrangement is a three and a half minute film that – without a single word – narrates something everyone experiences. Liking one but being liked by another, a confusion of attraction and the charm of not knowing… Love and all its versions do strange things to people. Inspired by Yves Saint Laurent’s romance, the film is set in a glossy Beverly Hills townhouse with a swimming pool – where all great romances happen. Caught between then and now, Ellis paints a picture utilising the visual language of Vaccarello’s Saint Laurent. His nostalgic homage to 1970s glam is now eroticised even further, with emotions and turmoil intertwining just like the rockabilly-esque clothes. Allow this to inspire the next few days, as you embark on a wild weekend romance. Bret Easton Ellis would approve.
