After days of teasing exactly nine clips and stills on Instagram, Selena Gomez has finally dropped the video for her single “Back to You,” and it’s just as beautifully bizarre as expected. The video sees Selena and an all-American boy ditch a lethargic suburban house party to steal a car, as we learn from pop-yellow captions that skip across the bottom of the screen. “Do you want to steal a car?” Selena asks, leading her guileless lover out of a window and into a conveniently parked convertible. All is semi-well in the Valencia-filtered rom-com until Selena and Nameless Boy discover a “WANTED” poster featuring their faces. Being the brains of the operation, Selena proceeds to burn the evidence — a.k.a the car.
The video is directed by Scott Cudmore, and draws influences spanning decades — from French new wave cinema to Tumblr-era captioned GIFS. “Back to You” is ostensibly an homage to Jean-Luc Godard’s gorgeous 1965 crime drama Pierrot le Fou. It also bears resemblance to the work of young Palestinian artist Sarah Bahbah, whose cinematic, yellow-captioned memes are so widely circulated that her Instagram bio reads, “you’ve probably seen my art on someone else’s account.” Selena’s taste for soft yet deeply saturated hues is hardly a new development though — hence her tight relationship with Petra Collins, who directed the singer’s equally seductive, suburban video for “Fetish.”
Check out the new video below.