Though Generation Z would be remiss to remember a time in which it wasn’t chic to make declarations of being fluid (something Miranda Hobbes would never comprehend with her statements about “bi being just a layover on the way to Gaytown), the latest single from Clean Bandit featuring Marina (who has shaken the dead weight of “and the Diamonds” in time to prepare us for her forthcoming album) and Luis Fonsi reminds us of something V for Vendetta once did also: it can be a fucking scandal to be homo (in this case, specifically, lesbianic).
For this reason, the poor soul that is Grace Chatto as a character yearning for a past in which she was in the arms of a girl she truly loved and loved her back ruminates on how it’s all gone wrong as she’s about to marry, of all things, a man (Luis Fonsi). Choosing dick as a continued means to placate a society that persists in leaning toward the right despite the fact that we’re supposed to be “in the future” is how her life has turned out, an even grander political statement than the one made in the video for “Solo” featuring Demi Lovato.
And as she resigns herself to a heteronormative life spent staring at nothing while eating meals out together and arguing over what will be the least difficult item to assemble from Ikea (though these things happen just as easily to gay couples), all she has to cling to are her memories of the one that got away as Marina sings, “Find me in another place and time/If only, if only you were mine/But I’m already someone else’s baby.”
Flashbacks to the “September” in question, when Chatto and the object of her desire were doing light play sex acts at summer camp, we ultimately come to find that it was a homophobic male counselor who put the kibosh on any “hot” feelings for making both experience shame and self-loathing for following their hearts. Though, of course, the counselor himself was probably aroused by the sight of the two kissing behind the sheets hanging on the clothing line, like the cliche fucks that all men are. After scolding them, the two disband, leaving the door open for a boy to eventually attempt, as best as he can, to enter the cautious heart of Chatto’s character, herself only giving it a chance as a means to cleanse the sense of chagrin she was made to feel at such a formative age.
Marina, who appears in the video as a sort of narrator who saw the whole calamity unfold from her objective perspective as a fellow camp attendee, appears to be just as regretful as Chatto for the strange and cruel destiny that the hands of Fate can manipulate with such disregard for the foolish human need to “achieve satisfaction” (which, if achieved, could never be satisfaction anyway, as a new want always arises).
“You fell through the cracks in my hands,” Marina rues, at one point singing in the style of an adolescent performing on a stage for a summer camp talent show (something Wet Hot American Summer‘s Susie and Ben know all about). So it is that all Chatto has is her memories of the one that slipped through those cracks further pronounced by the judgment of a harsh world. That the love of Chatto’s life shows up at the wedding to watch the knife sink in deeper (though it’s somewhat unclear as to whether or not this might just be her apparitional incarnation, to lend a more ghostly version of The Graduate feel) adds still further a tragic and fatalistic slant to the already dramatic for its Latin-tinged beats alone narrative.
Marina, meanwhile, bemoans, “Wish I had met you at another place and time,” begging the question: is true love–the kind we can never forget about–always a victim of circumstances that conspire to keep two lovers apart? Would they be so interested in one another if they were given the chance to give monogamy its proper chance to turn stale? One supposes that would make for just the sort of programming Netflix could sanction (hopefully with this song as its ironic intro).
