L'ENFER

The sober and minimalist music video to "L'Enfer" was co-created by Julien Soulier, Stromae himself, his brother Luc van Haven and his wife Coralie Barbier and published in February 2022. Stromae is a very conceptual artist when it comes to his music videos, so it is no surprise to see such a thought-through visual translation of the song.

With almost only a piano accompaniment, the song itself talks about depression and suicidal thoughts. How when we are depressed, we feel very much alone with these feelings, but of course there are many other people feeling similarly (first verse). A lot of stuff is just playing in one's head. In the chorus the subject is on the suicidal thoughts that sometimes emerge as the only solution to the hell that these concepts are sending him through.

Guilt is talked about in the second verse, the guilt that accumulates in one's head and how when the"guilt channel" ("chaîne culpabilité") is on, it is too late to stop.

The last part, I will call it bridge, focuses on overthinking, which can on one hand seem like a tool to get out of the loop but is more likely a tool to keep the person trapped inside it.

The tone of the lyrics is very personal and descriptive, with the bridge turning the language around a bit as if the singer is talking to himself there.

The music video depicts the depth of depression and suicidal thoughts very well. In my eyes it is a masterpiece of simplicity, meticulously planned and flawlessly executed. The whole video is a dolly-out one shot, there must have been a lot of technical planning and practice ahead of shooting it.

In an interview in 2014, Stromae stated that sometimes, he already likes to think about the music video while writing the song, as it might help him finish it. Did he work on this song and video in that way as well?

The close up of a closed eye. Shaky handheld camera trying to focus. The eye opens, looking tired, watching the viewer. It must be hard to keep eye contact. After blinking several times, the eye looks away, as if scanning the room or avoiding the viewers gaze.

When the singer starts talking/singing, he looks back at us, as if what he is saying he is confessing directly to us.

"Je suis pas tout seul à être tout seul"

"I am not alone in being alone", he says, more looking down than glimpsing up to the camera, fighting to keep eye contact.

We are uncomfortably close to Stromae's face here. Does it feel like we can almost see the thoughts running through his head? Feel the tension behind his eyes and forehead?

The camera moves backwards very very slowly; both of Stromae's eyes are in the picture now. As he is talking about loneliness and how even though many people are lonely, all of them respectively are still very alone, he seems to be thinking, reflecting – still struggling to keep eye contact.

For the first twenty seconds of the video have only seen one of his eyes, and only now, towards the end of the first verse, do we get to see the rest of his face. The shadows on his face change as a lamp is panning over it, like a simulation of days and nights passing by. His perception of time warped, as three, four days fly by while these thoughts are keeping his mind occupied. All days feel the same, dull, grey. In the end, a bright light illuminates one side of his face, leaving the other in the shadows.

"J'ai parfois eu des pensées suicidaire et j'en suis peu fière"

"I have sometimes had suicidal thoughts and am not proud of it", he sings, looking down again at the end of the sentence. We can now see his full face and he starts singing about the hell that our thoughts (in this case his) can be for ourselves, all the while looking directly at us viewers again. The close proximity infers intimacy, he is emotionally open, and, as I perceive it, extremely vulnerable here. Towards the end of the chorus it is revealed where he is sitting: an empty, mint-colored room (the typical green of hospitals and medical face-masks), wearing an outfit of thick cream-white clothes – the colour in this context also reminiscent of clothing of psychiatric patients, even though the cut/pattern itself does not directly refer to it. What does this imply? Is the brain so filled with the words of his thinking that there are no more visual cues it can imagine? Is he in his own world, where he is alone and has nowhere to go, basically swimming without anything to hold onto? Depression can make one emotionally numb, so the clothes and room kind of represent that for me. He is there, it is soft (the clothes), but there is not much. There is nothing in the room to be excited about, neither in a happy nor in an angry sense.

The way he talks and the words he uses make this video feel a bit like a therapy session. He is the patient and the camera (and thus the viewers?) his therapist.

An instrumental intermezzo follows, during which he is left alone with his thoughts. The camera moves from a close shot to a medium shot, quite suddenly creating a lot of distance between himself and the viewers. Is the depression creating that distance? As we see him as a whole person now, we see him from a less intimate, more observant point of view.

This whole part was filmed with a time-lapse effect. He flinches, shifts his eyeballs unusually from side to side, wipes his face with his hands, breathes quickly and deep as if anxious and hits his head repeatedly, then apparently tries to calm down and quieten the thoughts that are tormenting him, as if externalising his emotions.

As the camera moves even farther away we can see that he is alone in that monochrome room, sitting on a block in his monochrome outfit, his long black hair in a sleek high ponytail.

Since there is only one colour, one could talk about a lack of colours in this room.

On the other hand, as Josef Albers states in his book "Interaction of Color": "If one says 'red' (the name of a color) and there are 50 people listening, it can be expected that there are 50 reds in their minds. And one can be sure that all these reds will be very different."

In that sense, this one colour might represent how this is Stromae's story and someone else's will be different again. And all that I write here is me relating to the things he is singing about and depicting in the video.

The song continues to the second verse and he turns away from us viewers, looking towards the left side of the screen. The light above him dims and leaves him in the darkness, occupied by the guilt the lyrics talk about. It doesn't seem like he is directing his words to a person in the room, but rather to himself in an introspective, reflective manner. Suddenly, he flinches again, accompanied by a "Wuah" sung by a choir, then the lights turn back on, putting him in the spotlight. Perhaps reality called back out to him, making him reflect on his spiral of thoughts, a faint try to get him out. Still facing to the side, he sings "C'est là que j'aimerais tout oublier" ("That's when I would like to make it all disappear"). Next, he turns his face towards us with an "Actually" ("Du coup"), which is the beginning of the chorus, as if returning to the conversation. Continuing, he turns his whole body slightly towards the camera again, his hands fidgeting in his lap. He looks down to his hands as he speaks, then looks back to the camera, performing the discomfort of confessing suicidal thoughts to someone.

At the end of the chorus he gets up, now really facing the viewers again, and takes a step towards the camera as if ready to fight his thoughts.

Another instrumental intermezzo follows. He stops, and it almost seems like he is being held back by the visual effect (instrumental?). In slow motion he attempts to advance, jumps, and screams, but without sound. Here I can feel his despair very much, it is heartbreaking to watch.

"Tu sais, j'ai mûrement réfléchi. Et je sais vraiment pas quoi faire de toi. Justement, réflèchir, c'est bien le problème avec toi."

"You know I reflected on it thoroughly. And I really don't know what to do about you. Exactly, reflecting, that’s your problem."

There we have the bridge or whatever we are going to call this part of the song. It has a different sound, it is transported differently in the visual sense and it addresses, for the first time, a person directly: You. Even if it is not exactly clear who the person he is talking to is, the addressant is most likely Stromae himself. He declares how the thoughts he has make him more depressed, but he still keeps thinking them again and again and again trying to get rid of them. During this part, the camera steadily moves farther away from the singer, leaving him alone in the empty room in a wide shot.

Another instrumental intermezzo follows, this time he is experiencing his emotions in real time, punching his fists into the air, walking backwards around the simple, mint-colored/hospital-green pedestal he had been sitting on. I will call these intermezzos the emotional space, where Stromae is externalising his emotions and physically trying to break out. Along with the days-passing-by lighting effect, they also represent how mental illness can make time feel warped, either not realising it is passing, it passing very fast or having it advance incredibly slowly and being in this chewy state in one's own head.

(Still, Stromae, "L'Enfer", 2022)

In the end the camera is very far away from the singer, so far that it is almost comical, how he seems to be more two- instead of three-dimensional. It is an ultra wide shot leaving him alone in the empty room, as if we have not been able to help him, or he himself. The therapy sessions cannot solve the problems with the head, they can only suggest ways to deal with them. He becomes smaller and smaller.

And then, shortly before the music video ends, the now tiny Stromae disappears into black while becoming the pupil of Stromae's eye again. The music video is a loop, as is depression, when the thoughts spiral and we end up at the same place again and again.

He, with all his thoughts and words becomes very small and disappears into his pupil, suggesting that what we just saw only played out in his head. As he described in the lyrics, these might be the thoughts that are endlessly plaguing him.

During the whole time, the camera is steadily moving away from Stromae, starting in a detail shot of his eye and ending in a very long shot, that is warping into the detail shot again. During the instrumental parts the camera movement is quicker than during the verses. Stromae is slowly gliding away from us – we cannot get a hold of him, as he is in his own world of hellish thoughts and feelings of depression. It can make one unable to really feel connected to others, which in turn makes depression feel lonelier again.

Mental health is a subject that is often not talked about out in the open, but rather in private with doctors and therapists, if at all. It is also a hard subject to talk about, asking deep vulnerability and trust to the person or people listening from the person recounting her experiences. The way it is talked about in this song and video is quite descriptive from Stromae's point of view and I think he found some very beautiful ways to talk about it without romanticising it.

As I mentioned, it feels a bit like a therapy session (it could also be group therapy), where Stromae is recounting his experience. Sometimes he is struggling to find the words, it is hard for him to keep eye contact at all times, he is fidgeting, flinching, trying to get rid of the thoughts and to get out of the loop.

Emotions are carefully displayed in this video. Almost physically they can be felt, from the acting to the slow movement of the camera to the warped time in the instrumental parts.

All in all "L'Enfer" is a beautiful insight into a rather heavy subject with music, lyrics and a video that intertwine and complement one another perfectly.

Co-directed by Julien Soulier, Luc Van Haver, Coralie Barbier and Paul Van Haver © Mosaert Label 2022

(Re-)Sources

Albers, Josef. "Interaction of Color" , 1963.

Blurt Team. "When Depression Makes us Feel Numb to Everything". blurtitout.org: https://www.blurtitout.org/2019/09/19/depression-feel-numb/

Lott, Tim. "What does depression feel like? Trust me - you really don't want to know". theguardian.com: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/apr/19/depression-awareness-mental-illness-feel-like

Stromae - L'Enfer - Julien Soulier. royalpost.fr: https://www.royalpost.fr/project/stromae-lenfer-julien-soulier/

Stromae. "L'Enfer". youtube.com: https://youtu.be/vBuXVGh5Q6M?t=152