Dior Homme vs. Contagion
Let’s conduct an experiment:
Mute this Dior Homme perfume commercial, and pause it for a second. Now open up this music and play it in the background. “They’re Calling My Flight” creates the perfect ambience for a deadly virus to spread in the 2011 film Contagion. Now, swiftly switch back to the Dior video and resume it on mute, but with the Contagion music on.
We have just transformed a lighthearted tea parlor scene into a dangerous liaison that could totally have been taken from Contagion. Did it work for you?
In Contagion, a lot of close-up shots are given to risky moments like hands touching surfaces, people contacting each other’s skin, etc. This is especially true in the Macau casino scenes (41:36 — 42:25, 46:58–48:50), where Gwyneth Paltrow acted as the patient zero. Similar shots can be seen in the Dior commercial, where you see hands touching the face, the mouth, the green teacup.
Both film clips have erotic connotations steeped in an exotic pleasure paradise that is Asian culture. Red and green are the colors used throughout, telling the story of the night. Gwyneth is trying to flirt with an ex-boyfriend and schedule a hookup, and the two people in the Dior perfume no doubt are thinking something along the same lines.
The neck of the protagonists is focused on from the back (Contagion 41:41, 47:06; Dior 0:16, 0:31). Both necks are supposed to be somewhat provocative, but the neck of Gwyneth has some patches of red marks on it. Her face is more bare with less makeup, and you can almost see the blood vessels or the very biological material of her flesh. The lighting in Dior is darker so the skin of the protagonists are more perfect.
Interestingly, the Dior camerawork is supposed to mimic what the characters are seeing themselves. The details of the man’s body are seen from the perspective of the woman. The lips, the chest, etc. His face is obscured most of the time, almost for the entirety of the video.
The woman’s face is fully shown — she is subject to the gaze of everyone, and the potential consumers of the perfume. There is one detailed shot of her chest: the top part of her shirt is unbuttoned and some skin is showing through.
On the other hand, the shots of Gwyneth is interspersed with a universal view. The unstable closeups are supposedly creating a drunkenness, a late night laid-backness that Gwyneth is experiencing. But all of this is interrupted by the CCTV camera footage and the stills captured from it. Everything becomes suddenly colder, more blurry, darker in color. Less vivid and more deadly. The third viewpoint, god’s omniscient view that is not available to participants at the time, intervenes and reveals the danger hidden underneath pleasure.
