Think back to your teenage sexual fantasies. If you can remember any, they were probably a rotating series of the mundane and the psychosexually surreal, where erotic yearning collided with a personality just starting to form around its new interests.This is what CANADA, the team behind the hip erotica of El Guincho’s hip “Bombay” video, delivers for Tame Impala’s “The Less I Know The Better.” Their latest isn’t as gloriously exhibitionist as “Bombay.” Instead, this short film has a narrative, an erotic fantasia that plays out inside the minds of its two characters—a teenage basketball player and a cheerleader.
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It starts unassumingly enough, with the guy running suicide sprints and the girl looking longingly at him, but things quickly descend into the surreal and erotic as the camera dollies inside a very, very long gym locker, which opens to reveal the girl with her legs open over a locker room bench, and the boy's head between them. What follows, then, is a cinematic panoply featuring an acrobatic gorilla, dance numbers, blood, “Take On Me”-style animation, and a female body covered in multicolored paint, amongst other things.
The video would be mere titillation (and jailbait-y titillation at that) if not for the cheeky nostalgia at play, which should make viewers recall the many-splendored possibilities of sexual awakening presented to their now vanished teenage brains. A time when everything was fresh and new, and you were several years away from running headlong into the dark void of domestic relationships. So it’s a sweet homage to those near or distant days of new love, which fits the hopeful yet melancholic vibe Tame Impala lays down in “The Less I Know The Better.”
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