The Kilometer Disposition

The video for Sébastien Tellier’s Kilometer depicts a man living what I can only describe as the correct life: a villa out of 1960s European cinema, an abundance of beautiful half-dressed women who seem permanently available, NES cartridges arranged around the place like ritual objects, and Tellier himself presiding over all of it with the calm authority of a man who has simply stopped apologizing. He plays it as a kind of greased messiah. I find this aspirational.

There’s a category of fantasy this represents—the kind where excess has already settled into routine, comfortable and slightly stupid, before the inevitable wreckage. You know from every film that this arrangement ends badly. The villa, the women, the warm afternoons bleeding into each other—it’s always one scene before total collapse. Tellier’s video ends before that part, which is the correct artistic choice.

Kilometer is slow and narcotic, organ-heavy, French in that untranslatable way where sleaze and elegance refuse to disentangle. The video is its ideal visual companion. The NES part in particular. I’m not going to pretend otherwise.