14 DAY TRIAL // Last this week, Adele broke her long musical silence to release the first single off the upcoming album “25.” “Hello,” the leading single, also received an official music video, embedded in full and in HD below.
The video went viral within hours of release, and much of that media attention went to the fact that, in the age of the smartphone, Adele uses a vintage flip phone to attempt to communicate with her ex-lover, who refuses to pick up her call after she broke his heart.
Twitter in particular had a blast with said flip phone, much to the frustration of director Xavier Dolan. Speaking with the LA Times, he says the phone isn’t meant to show that the video takes place some years ago. The explanation is, in fact, much simpler than that: he hates iPhones.
“The real explanation is that I never like filming modern phones or cars. They're so implanted in our lives that when you see them you're reminded you're in reality. If you see an iPhone or a Toyota in a movie, they're anti-narrative, they take you out of the story. If I put an iPhone or a modern car in a movie it feels like I'm making a commercial,” he says.
Ironically, it was his desire to not make a commercial that distracted from the narrative he was trying to build. Talk about a spectacular backfire! Dolan admits that he found it very frustrating and that he wished he could reach out to all the people tweeting GIFs with the flip phone back and forth, to tell them to stop it.
