Les Jupes is a sensual, pulsating song by demure French chanteuse Robert (pronounced like row-bear). The song is on her album Sine. During the entire clip, Robert caresses the camera, dressed in a blue fabric bathing suit. Her setting is a shower-esque room, covered in bluish-white tiles.
This early Gondry video shows his interest in fractals in reality is nothing new. Let Forever Be cut a store clerk's life into sixths and eighths, littering her reality with the effects of multiplication. The life of Björk's Bachelorette play looped inside itself until the audience was more confused than amused.
The trippy Les Jupes features Robert's reality replicated. For instance, during the first chorus, Robert holds her hands to her face. As she repeats her lines, her face replicates inside of her hands and unwavering bangs.
In some sequences, the room is replicated to look like a Q-Bert-meets-Escher environment where multiple Robert walk the ceilings, floors, and walls of the rooms. At the end of the video, the Roberts disappear, revealing the true Robert.
Capturing Robert's true beauty is something people didn't think was in Gondry's capabilities. In RES, Gondry calls Les Jupes "the first attempt to do something with a beauty light. [This video proved] I could portray a pretty girl in a pretty way."
For another short sequence, Robert walks away from the camera towards the wall. When she meets the wall, it disappears, revealing another room. This action replicates until the rooms fade into a long hallway.
Most of the other shots in the video consist of Robert writhing around the shower room, looking much the victim of record company pressure as Gondry was in those days. While Les Jupes acts merely as the French pop video its label ordered, it shows the vision Gondry was trying to enact. Juxtapose it with any of his later videos, and you reveal the real, stifling impact record labels have on the creatives in the music video world.
To view the entire clip, click here.
The video was released on a VHS video in 2003 sold only at Robert concerts, called "4 Clips," and as a Quicktime MOV on the 2001 re-release of the album Sine.
