Still drinking plain old water to cool down on a hot summer's day? How bourgeois! This season's haute thirst quencher is Perrier, the French sparkling water that apparently has the power to stop a global heat wave—at least according to "The Drop," a new short film produced for the beverage company by Ogilvy & Mather in Paris.
The spot, directed by Swedish music-video director Johan Renck, takes cues from the worlds of fashion, French auteur filmmaking, and Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey to tell the tale of a beautiful woman charged with ending an oppressive heat wave enveloping Earth. Dressed in a chic black dress (it may not be the best outfit for 100-degree weather, but it's très Chanel), our heroine arrives at a stately mansion populated by sweating diplomats. After donning a futuristic gold space suit, she climbs into a translucent orb and shoots off into space. With the world watching closely, she arrives at the sun, intending to douse it with Perrier, but is so parched that she drinks the whole bottle herself, much to the chagrin of the melting masses back home. Lucky for them, all it takes is a single leftover drop—flicked from the woman's lips—to cool the sweltering star.
It's a fantastical, strange story, but so beautifully produced that it rivals any high-fashion film. The images are stunning—red lipstick melting in its tube, a newspaper catching fire, the blazing surface of the sun—and the music otherworldly and dramatic enough to make you forget that this is a promotion for bottled water, not an epic tale. If you don't mind a bit of fantasy in your advertising, it's hard not to be enthralled.
CREDITS
Client: Perrier
Agency: Ogilvy & Mather, Paris
Chief Creative Officer: Chris Garbutt
Creative Director: Thierry Chiumino
Art Directors: Florian Bodet, Baptiste Clinet, Nicolas Lautier
Head of TV Production: Laure Bayle
Digital Producer: Hugo Diaz
Director: Johan Renck
Post-production: Mikros Image