Let's go back to the Peugeot "Drive of Your Life" ad I brought up earlier this year when I looked at its shark-driven sequel. Here, we joined a businessman on his daily commute in a Peugeot 406, and were given a window into his stream of consciousness, as he envisioned various evocative images to the upbeat sounds of "Search For The Hero", a then-recent hit for M People. The centrepiece of the ad involved our protagonist saving a small girl in a striking red coat from being rubbed out by a tanker truck gone out of control (the fate of the truck's driver, however, was not confirmed).
At three minutes, "Drive of Your Life" is an unusually lengthy spot, so much so that when it made its television debut in February 1996, Peugeot bought out the entire News at Ten ad break so as to showcase it in its full glory. After that, the ad continued to make the rounds in significantly truncated versions, one a minute in length, the other forty seconds. In its complete form, the ad plays deceptively like a pop video; indeed, many of the images feel as though they would not have been at all out of place in the actual M People video. The grandeur and expenditure of the ad strove for an epic, cinematic quality, but not everyone was charmed by the ambition; the ad netted criticism from several commentators, who found the bombardment of feel-good imagery and vague pop psychology to be an exercise in superficiality, and largely incidental to the product in question. An anonymous commentator is quoted in this Campaign article as musing, "All cars in this market are essentially the same. Peugeot is trying to distinguish itself by making car drivers feel special. Make them think they're heroes rather than boring businessmen." Bingo. But then advertising generally aspires to make consumers feel special or empowered for purchasing entirely mundane products, so this is simply business as usual. Arminta Wallace of The Irish Times offers a more in-depth criticism, noting that the ad has curiously little to say about the car itself and branding the choice of musical accompaniment as "an inoffensive song by one of the most politically correct groups on the current rock scene". All in all, Wallace dismisses the ad as "just another humourless bit of machismo gone mad, a Nineties re visitation of the days when all you had to do to sell a car was drape a bikini clad supermodel over the body work."
The one aspect of the ad that strikes me as being at odds with Wallace's assessment is the recurring image of the girl in the red coat. As a symbol, she seems to be constantly threatening to tip the ad over into something altogether uncannier than the peppy imagery and upbeat backing anthem would imply. It's in the girl that we find the ad's narrative backbone, as confirmed by the shorter versions of the ad, which all retain this particular portion of the hero's fantasy (everything else is largely expendable) and end in the same way, with our hero being momentarily preoccupied by the image of the red-clad girl, even after he has finished his empowering commute. She provides an outlet for his machismo gone mad, certainly, but the ending posits her as an enigma, one that continues to linger after the idle fantasy has reached its natural end and our hero is obligated to return to the "real" world, signified by his nine to five job. She creates a disturbance in how fantasy and reality are distinguished in this ad, suggesting that the former has a life of its own.
The running theme of our hero being haunted by visions of an imperiled girl in a red coat strikes me as inherently unsettling because it brings to mind Nicolas Roeg's arthouse horror favourite Don't Look Now (1973). There, John Baxter (Donald Sutherland) spends the duration plagued by his guilt at being unable to save his daughter, who was wearing a distinctive red raincoat, from drowning. Later, while he and his wife Laura (Julie Christie) are staying in Venice on a business assignment, John becomes haunted by the image of a small figure in a red coat wandering the streets. Although he is initially dismissive of Laura's attempts to contact their daughter with the help of a couple of self-proclaimed psychics, eventually the lure of the red-coated figure becomes too strong and John is compelled to follow and confront it, believing that he can finally make peace with his demons. The figure turns around and is revealed to be - spoilers - not his daughter but a dwarf with a meat cleaver who proceeds to slash his throat (thus fulfilling the psychics' warning that he was in danger so long as he remained in Venice). On paper it all sounds tremendously silly, and in lesser hands it would have been easy for such a sequence to come off as camp or comically ludicrous, but Roeg approaches it masterfully, making it every bit as elegant, shocking and harrowing as it needs to be.
The image of the red-coated figure stands out so persuasively in Don't Look Now because there is so little red elsewhere in the film, meaning that the figure really does seem as strange and otherworldly to us as it does to John. A similar technique had also been applied more recently in Steven Spielberg's Schindler's List (1993), a black and white production featuring a fleeting but unforgettable intrusion of colour, in which a small Jewish girl is seen walking down the street in a red coat during the liquidation of the Krakow ghetto. No information is given on who this child is. In narrative terms, she is an extra, one of millions killed in the horrors of the Holocaust. But her distinctive red coat marks her out clearly as an individual. So much so that when, later in the film, we see the body of the girl, red coat and all, being hauled away on the back of the cart, we immediately make the connection and feel the shock of her demise. In both cases, the red coat is disturbing in its duality, signifying the vigorous innocence of the child, and their raw potential as a human being, and the unspeakable horrors gearing up to destroy them.
Film critic Peter Bradshaw identifies the red coat in Don't Look Now as signifying a "tonal ambiguity", an uncomfortable melting pot of emotions whose meaning only becomes clear at the end when John realises, too late, that he has been pursuing his own demise through the passages of Venice. Says Bradshaw, "The child has died, but the horror of the situation isn't that we are left grievingly alive but that we must join her, and sooner than we think." The image of the red coat represents the two-fold nature of loss, with the daughter representing the agony of grief and the dwarf the grotesque reminder of our own mortality. Ostensibly, daughter and dwarf are polar opposites, yet their common garment establishes them as two sides of the same coin. (Incidentally, I disagree with Bradshaw about why the dwarf shakes her head, for to me it looks like this is in direct response to John's startled plea of "Wait...". The murderous dwarf is the monstrous embodiment of John's own mortality, and now that they have come face to face, there can be no bargaining or compromise. Sooner or later, we all meet our fate.)
Peugeot's ad is shot in predominantly muted colours, ensuring that the girl stands out as the commanding figure of the protagonist's fantasy. The colour red does feature elsewhere in the ad - it is seen in the Native American's war paint, and in the blood when the protagonist cuts himself while shaving - and while the red here is less conspicuous than it is with the girl's coat, it reinforces a running theme of the red representing self-expression, passion and risk. I think there is a duality to this red-coated figure too, albeit perhaps not as morbid as the one featured in Roeg's picture. On the surface, she is the perfect victim in need of rescue. When first we see her, in the full-length version, she is skipping along by the roadside, seemingly oblivious to the danger headed in her direction. We then cut to a shot of that gargantuan hulk of metal speeding along a dusty highway, and while there is nothing, at this point, to directly indicate that the truck and girl have anything to do with one another, the mere juxtaposition of puny human and giant machine is enough to establish the two as having a common date with destiny. The effect is ominous, and yet when they finally appear in the same frame, with the girl positioned directly in the path of the runaway tanker, she stands there strangely stoically, facing the oncoming calamity without flinching. She certainly doesn't look as though she's frozen in terror - to the contrary, a borderline knowing smile flashes across her face. Then, when our hero saves her, she has her arms already outstretched, as if she were waiting all along for him to come and bundle her up in his arms. She embraces the role of the ready-made cipher all-too readily, which makes sense given the idealised nature of the scenario.
The ending, however, suggests a very different dynamic. As the hero leaves his Peugeot 406, his attentions are suddenly caught by the girl - her bright red coat, coupled with the dolly shot closing in on her, indicate that this is another fantasy vision, yet his reaction is as if he is seeing her the real world. For a moment, we see him linger in his tracks, as if contemplating heading in another direction, but in the end gives in and goes where the suit and briefcase decree he must. The girl, see, is not the victim in this equation - rather, she is the danger. She is the personification of the raw, unmitigated adrenaline rush that propels our hero through the entirety of his fantasy and which, as he leaves his car and its associated fantasy life, continues to beckon him toward something more exhilarating. He does not answer the call - which, given John's fate when he went in search of his own red-coated fixation in Don't Look Now, is probably for the best. The girl represents the allure of the kind of untamed existence that we wish could be more than just a fantasy, but that few of us have the means or the willingness to actually pursue to the full. Our hero ultimately decides to stick to his prosaic existence, but the image of the girl gets to him, a tantalising reminder of his unfulfilled potential and of the undefined something more that lingers ever out there. He can gaze at it longingly, but that's as close as he's prepared to get. Despite the ad's closing assertion that "there is no such thing as an average person", the ultimate suggestion appears to be that most of us are quite resigned to being average, and that is the specter that haunts us each and every day.
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