Featuring strong Gay vibes, Burning Desire, the 2017 Spring/Summer Mercedes-Benz Gay fashion campaign, takes the German brand and its rebel CLA four-door coupe back to Stone Age Romania.
The promo video pits the CLA against the strength of desire that burns between German model Lucie Von Alten and English musician Eliot Sumner, whose father is none other than legendary Sting. The two stars are not only style rebels, but real-life partners as well. And yes, they’re both women, two very beautiful and accomplished women to be more precise.
The campaign’s main attraction, though, is set to be the exotic location chosen by acclaimed Swedish director Christian Larson, an old steel warehouse attached to a disused stone quarry in Bucharest, Romania. Raw and powerful, it was an apt environment in which the director Christian Larson could capture the subversive spirit of the CLA.
“I think that there is a beauty in destruction and in this case, I felt fire, and burning things, could look very beautiful. Fire is always something that brings people together – the storyline of the two girls meeting is about them being intrigued by the fire – and it also suggests the idea of “playing with fire”. I wanted to play with emotions, objects, elegance, rebelliousness in some kind of virtual dystopian world,” Larson explains.
Fire is the most commanding visual metaphor for desire, and the film begins with a shot of Sumner surrounded by clouds of smoke, holding a bouquet of roses that has been set alight. As she strides into focus down a liquid runway, attack dogs bark and a piano is glimpsed, alive with flames. The CLA’s energetic exterior is viewed in pools of water. As Sumner paces down the runway, Von Alten emerges from the CLA, her graceful beauty mirrored by a ballet dancer en pointe. They walk towards each other, and as their fingers touch, igniting fire, inflaming the CLA. They step back and survey their incendiary connection, with each other and with the car. The film ends with the iconic Mercedes-Benz logo burning in the darkness.
