Jim Jar­musch has direct­ed a new short film for Saint Laurent

Jim Jar­musch has been keep­ing qui­et and stay­ing out of the spot­light dur­ing these past months of quar­an­tine, hav­ing left us with his most recent film The Dead Don’t Die in 2019. While news of anoth­er fea­ture has yet to arrive, yes­ter­day brought the next best thing, in the form of a new exper­i­men­tal short from the inim­itable writer and director.

Jar­musch has joined forces with lux­u­ry brand Saint Lau­rent for French Water, a nine-minute project which dou­bles as a show­case for the Spring/​Summer 2021 col­lec­tion from the his­toric French fash­ion house. In it, a hand­ful of celebri­ties from with­in and with­out the Jar­musch sta­ble make their way around a haunt­ing yet ethe­re­al com­plex, search­ing for one anoth­er and over­lap­ping with themselves.

Chloë Sevi­gny (who appeared in The Dead Don’t Die as a small-town cop) and Julianne Moore wan­der around, look­ing for their friend Char­lotte Gains­bourg; Indya Moore (the break­out star of Pose), in turn, looks for the two of them. Every­one con­verges near the end, don­ning what we can only pre­sume are extreme­ly pri­cy design­er facemasks.

A wait­er (por­trayed by a suave-look­ing Leo Reil­ly, son of John C.) observes their com­ings and goings with a haughty detach­ment. It’s all quite French, a qual­i­ty that short itself reflex­ive­ly pokes fun at.

Aes­thet­i­cal­ly, how­ev­er, it’s an avant-garde com­po­si­tion the likes of which we haven’t seen from Jar­musch in a minute, more lib­er­at­ed in its style than most com­mer­cial, the­atri­cal releas­es can allow. The rich pur­ples flood­ing the cav­ernous cham­bers, the impos­si­bly sleek sur­faces, and tricks with cir­cu­lar pat­tern­ing all sug­gest an artist loos­en­ing up and play­ing around.