Although the non-sonorously named Dua Lipa couldn’t have known in 2019 that “Don’t Start Now,” the first single from her sophomore record, Future Nostalgia, would have such unabashed meme potential in the quarantine scene of 2020, perhaps something within her intuited an overall “stay at home” vibe for the enforced trend of the year. One in which doing so could be the difference between not just irrevocable heartache versus perpetual carefreeness, but life versus death. As such, the crux of Future Nostalgia’s third single, “Break My Heart,” is a theme of “if only I had stayed inside where nothing ever happens, I wouldn’t have been doomed for life.”
Indeed, its accompanying Henry Scholfield-directed video suspends reality and contracts time to prove as much (in addition to mirroring everyone’s quarantine feels of late). Starting with an opening shot of Lipa standing atop a car in the middle of a traffic-jammed New York street (gone forever are those days)–as evidenced by a “just for show” yellow cab (we all know no one uses them anymore) in the background–Lipa makes her way somewhat frantically through the metal thicket, as though she’s searching for someone specific before the first abrupt yet completely seamless transition reveals a toy car crashing into the air in the hallway of Lipa’s apartment building. She then walks into her abode to make brief “Ghost of Christmas Past”-like contact with the presumed “one” who broke her heart.
Alas, he becomes out of reach quickly as the ground beneath her performs some “Virtual Insanity” antics and she slides along the floor of the “boat” she’s in only for it to become a miniature that she’s now tilting in her own hand at some nightclub (remember those?). In her Lolita-meets-Lana Del Rey-meets Cher Horowitz approved barrettes and neo-Chanel suit getup, she takes centerstage to do her best version of post-00s choreography with a bevy of club-going backup dancers. After expressing, “I’m afraid of all the things you could do to me/If I would’ve known it, baby/I would’ve stayed at home/’Cause I was doing better alone.” And alone she is as the wall inside the club turns into a portal that rockets her into a free-standing set of airplane seats in the sky before it turns into a full-fledged plane (something about it feels like a nod to Britney Spears’ “Toxic,” but then, what plane scene in a music video doesn’t?). All alone inside at first (perhaps having taken a post-travel ban flight), the carpeting of the plane is very overtly ripped from The Shining as it does another quicksand-like movement in pulling Lipa toward something.
When a number of fellow fliers appear to put their luggage in the overhead bin before joining her in another dance, we soon see that plane is just a fragmented piece inexplicably floating in midair with nothing ostensibly there to keep it afloat (kind of like the United States at the moment). Another piece of the plane coming toward her then opens the transition to Lipa being under the covers in her bed as she once again declares, “I should’ve stayed at home…/But when you said, ‘Hello’/I knew that was the end of it all/I should’ve stayed at home/’Cause now there ain’t no letting you go.” In the present context, it feels like she’s no longer just talking about fatal heartbreak being let go of, but also a deadly encounter with COVID-19. Upon removing the covers, however, she seems horrified to be next to someone she didn’t really want to be, running to the bathroom as the bedroom rotates to show a different dude in a different bed before she scampers to the bubble bath-filled tub in full pajama getup, slides in and falls into what then transforms into a frothy cocktail being held by her back at the club scenario.
With all of this twisting and turning–this unexpected segueing from one reality to another–one almost tends to believe Lipa is trolling us as she mirrors back our own fragmented and indecipherable reality as we do what she failed to before it was too late by staying at home (thereby enacting the Sliding Doors Law of Time and avoiding meeting her new love). And as the video concludes with a collage playback of all the strange transitions from one milieu to another, we can’t help but feel slightly jealous that most of them involve being in a public place (which was icky before, but now of course has endless cachet because it’s forbidden). So it is that Lipa persists in being the poster girl of 2020 for reasons why we should just chill at the crib, especially now that we have the Future Nostalgia album to “exercise” to.
