A cinematic rollercoaster ride sets the scene for a disturbed relationship — this is Oui ou Oui ou Non the new music video by Régina Demina. Like something out of the Tim Burton Wednesday series, the artist hurtles forward, sat as if kidnapped by a masked man. French-language and innocent but edgy, it’s a modern gothic shadow of Françoise Hardy’s “Le Temps de L’Amour”. Grown-up, yet nightmarish, this song is a gentle introduction to the increasingly wild EP SCRT that cartwheels from witch house to cloud rap.
There’s something Slavic about the cool damp forest the video is set in, and Demina’s striking appearance — she also models. The magical forest seems to wink at her fascination with folklore from the East that grew from her heritage, born to an Ashkenazi Jewish mother from Uzbekistan and an Orthodox Siberian father, or forests remembered from her childhood. The meandering guitar rhythm on the song is folky too. Born in Russia, aged four the artist moved to France, splitting time between East and West where she’d go into nature or into raves on the sink estate, both absorbed into SCRT. You find plurality most on the wider release as a whole.
Oui ou Oui ou Non zones in on the blurry lines between what we want and what we don’t want as Demina frowns or flashes a smile to the indecisive chorus. Hushed cutesy vocals are matched by the bows on her dress and blush on her cheeks, whilst the dense forest is captured in rock drums and instrumentation that could almost have jumped from the “Twilight” soundtrack. Oui ou Oui ou Non faces “hesitations of romantic commitment”, and casts the man as a potentially controlling force in the video. Sensuality is harnessed in her performance art (see Régina Demina as a mermaid) and persona, where she stages herself as innocent and sexy.
Regina will be performing live at Print, Paris on May 27th.
