This was originally going to be a post about how quaint it is that Volkswagen filmed an ad in France and oh isn't that lovely, but upon watching this commercial several times, I noticed something else. This ad is really, incredibly creepy.
Sure, everything starts out normal, if you consider the shot of the sign that says "Le Mans, France," that looks like it came from a deleted scene of The Shining totally normal. Cue the distorted angles of bodywork.
Then the music starts up. Okay, it's a bit jazzy. A little bit of saxophone, some trumpet. "Hey, that's kinda nice," you think. And then you listen a bit more, and a bit more, until you totally forget there's a Man speaking over the whole thing because you lost your train of thought right after you realized that it's a strangely jazzy rendition of Hava Nagila.
That's right, Hava Nagila.
Like you're at a Bar Mitzvah. And this is barely 20 years after the end of the Holocaust, and it's an ad for a car company created by Hitler, shot in what was once occupied France, and intended for the British market. So, not really a Bar Mitzvah.
But anyways. You've snapped out of it, and your mind focuses in again on the classic car commercial at hand. You're 18 seconds in, and suddenly there's a nice lady sitting there. She's just... sitting there. Staring straight ahead. Eyes focused on everything and nothing at all, right into the middle distance. But then ever so slowly her head rotates, twitching a bit as if it was sewed on wrong and needs to be re-calibrated. She smiles at you with only half her face, and you wonder if she's already consumed half your soul.
The two Beetles set off in a race down the streets of Le Mans, down the public roads that make up the Circuit de La Sarthe. "If you want, it can do 78 miles per hour, all day long, because its top speed is also its cruising speed," the Man intones. Something about that reminds me of Hotel California. He might as well be saying "you can check out anytime you like, but you can never leave."
There's a few shots of Beetles going around corners, and that's all pretty grand, and then a Beetle drives up a hill, and that's swell too. And then you hear the screeching of tires as one of the drivers slams on the front disc brakes. Surely, you fear the worst. Has he hit a schoolbus? Maybe he saw someone he wanted to avoid from high school?
No, it's a bunch of geese. Instead of geese noises however (I've heard geese before, a Canadian one once attacked me at a lake when I was 16, I don't like to talk about it) you hear the pigs squealing, the sounds of women and children crying and men gnashing their teeth. This, fellow Jalops, is the sound of the apocalypse.
A serial killer leans over the hood of the car, his eyes piercing through your windshield. You fear the worst, because clearly this ad has been jointly directed by Stanley Kubrick and Alfred Hitchcock, and Alfred Hitchcock had no bellybutton so surely this can't end well.
But alas, the serial killer only thirsts for the blood of geese, in his trenchcoat. Yeah, he's wearing a trenchcoat. In the French countryside. Weird.
And then, in the distance, you see the other Beetle driving off. And that's it. There's no closure, no resolution.
Man, I knew foreign films were weird, but not this weird. Maybe it has something to do with Le Mans.
I hope Allan McNish watches out for geese.