Cibo Matto’s ‘Sugar Water’: the mind-bending symmetry of a song and its video
When MTV launched in the early 1980s, music videos were primarily seen as glorified advertisements for pop stars, thus explaining the cavalcade of bands performing in front of plain white backdrops on Hollywood sound stages.
As the medium came into its own, however, bigger budgets, competitive producers, and ambitious young video directors had arguably turned MTV into the world’s best showcase for innovative short film concepts—unique visions that previously would have been relegated to limited audiences at big city film festivals or university screening rooms.
The French director Michel Gondry was a part of this new wave of young music video makers, many of whom became in-demand feature film directors in the ‘90s and 2000s: David Fincher, Antoine Fuqua, Spike Jonze, etc.
Gondry eventually followed suit, directing ten feature films over the past quarter century, including one of the very fucking best of that era, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Even so, Gondry’s music video work in the ‘90s and early 2000s arguably remains the most consistently creative and impressive part of his CV. Not only was he working with a who’s who of that period’s biggest artists, he was effectively helping them craft their own iconic goddamn images. Think of the Foo Fighters’ ‘Everlong’; Massive Attack’s ‘Protection’; Daft Punk’s ‘Around the World’; the White Stripes’ ‘Fell In Love with a Girl’; not to mention a boatload of incredible Bjork showcases: ‘Human Behaviour’, ‘Army of Me’, and ‘Hyperballad’ among them.
In the middle of that mid-1990s run with Björk, Gondry also directed what just might be his most subtly ingenious music video of all: Cibo Matto’s ‘Sugar Water’.
The Japanese-American trip-hop duo, best remembered by some ‘90s kids for their appearance at The Bronze in the Buffy the Vampire Slayer series, didn’t exactly shoot to mega stardom on the back of this video, but for people who saw it in 1996, it became the stuff of legend. With no YouTube available for an immediate re-watch, and no social media to argue about how it was made, viewers of the four-minute ‘Sugar Water’ video had to try and wrap their own brains around what the band had created under Gondry’s guidance.
The brilliance of ‘Sugar Water’ lies in its deceptive fucking simplicity. Inspired by the symmetrical structure of the song itself, which features a central “la-la” chorus and two pre-choruses in which “a black cat crosses my path,” Gondry splits the screen into two vertical halves. On the left, Yuka Honda goes about her day moving forward in time; on the right, Miho Hatori’s story unfolds in reverse. At first, the gimmick feels quirky but pretty goddamn harmless, two parallel lives with no real connection. But as the video progresses, the symmetrical mirrored halves start to interact in uncanny ways, culminating in the perfectly executed moment when Honda and Hatori literally crash into each other and cross the frame, “trading places”. Suddenly, the two timelines fold into each other, like a cinematic Möbius strip, or a much shorter and entertaining version of the shitstorm that was Christopher Nolan’s Tenet.
What makes it especially impressive is that Gondry achieved the effect without digital editing tricks. Honda and Hatori painstakingly performed actions in reverse, rehearsing movements and gestures so that when spliced together, the two halves of the story fit seamlessly. Even something as simple as pouring water or brushing hair became a puzzle to solve backwards, and timing was everything. Because Gondry, for some reason, was dedicated to getting the shots in a continuous take, any trip-up, including the release of a very real black cat, had to have spot-on precision or the whole thing would crumble.
Considering that even most Cibo Matto fans would have only seen this video a few times back in ‘96, the level of ambition here was fairly staggering. Gondry, a known perfectionist of the first order, had to be aware that the Herculean work put into ‘Sugar Water’ wouldn’t be immediately apparent to a random late-night MTV watcher. If anything, a first viewing is more confusing than amazing. Once you put the pieces together, though, and you realise what you’re seeing, it feels like the best type of magic trick.
Maybe Gondry and Cibo Matto also anticipated the YouTube era, when everybody could finally appreciate the full, frame-by-frame genius of ‘Sugar Water’ and its uniquely palindromic structure. It’s got 3.5million views at last count. That’s 3.5m more people than will see Gondry’s latest project, a big-budget musical feature film called Golden, which was recently shut down and permanently shelved by Universal Pictures.
