Lavender Diamond's Becky Stark has the most beautiful worst day ever.
Lavender Diamond's Becky Stark makes lush, mystical art-pop for the types of music lovers who like to ruminate over their pop and their past loves. (If pop music were beverages, room-temp bubblegum pop = supermarket-brand soda; Lavender Diamond = a fine Châteauneuf-du-Pape.) Similarly, actress-director Jena Malone is known for exactly those kinds of earthly, multidimensional, cerebral roles. And those similarities and symbiosis are obvious in Lavender Diamond's brand-new video, "I Don't Recall," directed by -- yes -- Jena Malone, in her directorial debut.
The "I Don't Recall" video, from the Damian Kulash-produced Incorruptible Heart album, is a one-woman woebegone exercise in paradox, as Jena catches Becky, the video's sole cast member (the other unspoken/ unseen cast member: loneliness) in a dusty despair that's so dreamlike that it feels like everything might end up OK -- not that it necessarily does. It's so sobering to watch a woman's worst day ever drag out across an unknowable expanse of time and space that the entire scene almost takes on an air of surreal humor. (Watching a man fall down a flight of stairs once isn't funny, but there's a twisted humor in watching him fall down a flight of stairs three more times if you can stomach it through the wincing.)
Becky's portrayal of a love-lost woman barely going through the daily motion of getting out of bed is so legi that her portrayal takes on a visceral quality, and the seamlessness of Becky's acting and Jena Malone's artistic influence clicks into place completely when you consider that Jena Malone was inspired by an Andrew Wyeth painting entitled "Christina's World," which both women bring to life.
Watch Lavender Diamond's "I Don't Recall" video, and check out an exclusive interview with actress/director Jena Malone after the jump.
