A Love Story, More or Less

Of all the kids the Disney machine processed and spat out the other side, Selena Gomez landed the softest and kept the most of herself intact. That’s not a small thing. The others detonated—some spectacularly, some pitifully. She juggled the music, the carefully calibrated rebellion (Spring Breakers being the obvious peak), and somehow stayed coherent throughout. Borderline old-fashioned in her self-possession, which in her world is genuinely strange.

The new thing is a short film called A Love Story, made with photographer and frequent collaborator Petra Collins for Instagram. Selena plays a bathing beauty who falls in love—with herself, apparently, or with a disembodied part of someone else, or with the green bathwater she’s floating in. I’m honestly not sure. The narrative is deliberately opaque in the way that can mean either something is very deep or nothing is happening at all, and I can’t fully determine which. Her breasts drift in the green water. That part I followed without difficulty.

You can read it as art or as content or as an elaborate excuse to see Selena Gomez wet and half-undressed, and the film seems cheerfully aware that all three audiences exist simultaneously. Petra Collins’ eye is good—there’s a dreamy domestic horror quality to the light that I found more interesting than I expected. The extended cut is on Petra’s IGTV. By the end of it I mostly wanted someone to hand Selena a proper horror film. The look she gets in certain frames suggests she could carry one without breaking a sweat.