Marco Brambilla’s Enchanting, Hypnotic “This Is Boss”

The film, This Is Boss, stars model Suvi Koponen. It starts with a rotating close-up of Koponen, straight slick hair tucked behind her ears, eyes closed. As the sounds of Tschaikovsky’s “The Sleeping Beauty” begin, we see the vision of forest at night, with trees marked by bands of light, appear in her mind.

Soon we are in the woods with Koponen, who stands underneath a spotlight, dressed in a long, white column of silk, her torso flanked by sheer panels from shoulder to hip. There’s a shot of the her walking alone through the misty thicket, calling to mind the lyric from Disney’s Sleeping Beauty, “I know you, I walked with you once upon a dream.” The film keeps to spinning, slowly at first, like a carousel picking up speed, as the image of Koponen mutliplies among the trees.

The continual movement of shots is reminiscent of Brambilla’s continuous loop videos. But the artist uses more of a subtle hand for This Is Boss. The hypnotic and fantastic quality we’ve come to expect from him is still there, and the film does end full circle. “Once the choreography reaches its crescendo, she collapses back into the original version of herself and we loop back to the beginning and her origin,” describes Brambilla.

Wu calls it “a spring awakening,” which we’ll take as a hint for what he has in store for us in the spring/summer 2015 line.