Petite Meller in the video for her song Baby Love (2015).
Click here to watch on YouTube.
Peitite Meller: she's French, she's fashionable, she's thin, she's pale, she's doll-like, she's studying for an MA in philosophy and she sings catchy nouveau-jazz pop ditties. I'm pretty sure, were he still alive, Serge Gainsbourg would already have written half-a-dozen songs for her.
In short: what's not to love about this object of perverse fascination and delight, now resident in London?
Well, there's her rather tiresome references to Freud and the unconscious and the slightly irritating elements of surrealism. For a young woman who cites Mille Plateaux as her favourite book one might have hoped not to end up back in the world of the nursery and the kind of lame sexual fantasies that are often described as forbidden, but which are actually familiar components of the pornographic imagination long circulated and sustained within our culture.
One might also object to the use of Africans, animals, and the elderly residents of a care home as extras (or little more than animated props) in her videos; exploiting their physical otherness in order to contrast and showcase her own ethereal beauty combining purity and privilege.
One might also object to the use of Africans, animals, and the elderly residents of a care home as extras (or little more than animated props) in her videos; exploiting their physical otherness in order to contrast and showcase her own ethereal beauty combining purity and privilege.
If I wanted to be cruel, I might suggest she over does the blusher in order to disguise the embarrassment she must feel at her knowing collaboration with (one suspects mostly male) designers, photographers, and filmmakers who subscribe to an aesthetic that looks to Lolita, Leni Riefenstahl, and Lady Gaga for inspiration.
But, I don't want to be cruel: rather, I want to give this intelligent and talented woman every opportunity to develop as an artist. In the meantime, I suppose I'll just have to make do with an occasional flash of her knickers and sing along like everyone else to Baby Love.
