Today, Swedish House Mafia and Lykke Li have released the official music video for their single “Happiness Is So Sad, which was shot entirely on phones at a house party in Guadalajara, Mexico, as different characters experience their own versions of the same night. Directed by Theo Lindquist with co-director Jorge G. Camarena, the video was shot on around 25 phones to capture the party from multiple perspectives. The phones are not a stylistic flourish; they are the concept.
No single camera holds the definitive version of what happened and the film plays out the way a night like this is remembered: fragmented, contradictory, intimate and different depending on who was holding the phone. “Phones have created a new visual language. It hasn’t really been exploited in storytelling properly, and here was an opportunity,” said Lindquist. At the centre of the party is Benny, a teenage boy who arrives with one hope: to kiss the girl he has loved for years.
He gets the moment he has waited for and loses it almost immediately. To her, it was a dare. To him, it was everything. Around them, everyone at the party is living a night that feels just as monumental in their own story. The film was written around the idea that everybody is the main character of their own night and a background figure in everyone else’s, with each phone catching a different piece of the same party. The story grew out of Lykke Li’s lyrics and the song’s title, which led Lindquist and co-writer Scott to nostalgia, the transience of happiness and mono no aware, the Japanese idea of the pathos of things. The happiest moments become the hardest to leave behind precisely because they were never meant to last.
Photo Credit: Boston Lynn Schulz
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