Kylie Minogue Gets Cloned In Endlessly Re-watchable ‘Come Into My World’

The early 2000s were something of a renaissance for Australian Pop Star Kylie Minogue. In 2001, her album Fever became the kind of peerless smash hit that most artists only dream of. International commercial success, every single carrying its weight for a memorable promotional run that lasted from late 2001 through to the first part of 2003. For folks who hadn’t been paying attention, they only needed to see & hear Kylie seductively luring them closer to the screen in the music video for ‘Can’t Get You Out Of My Head’ to understand that she was back in a big way.

But it’s the final video from this period that captures the imagination best and it’s no wonder that it was directed by Michel Gondry. A master of visual manipulation; Gondry had directed previously eye-catching videos for the likes of Bjork, Daft Punk, Radiohead, and Beck. His work here on Kylie Minogue’s ‘Come Into My World’ may be his most compelling.

The core of the video involves Kylie watching around and around the same circular path in the middle of a French cityscape. Each time she reaches the starting point again, a new Kylie enters the scene and joins the existing one(s). 

But that’s the easy part. The real heavy lifting is in all of the background extras who are also cloned and exponentially added into the scene as well. Each new extra means a new unknown element that this world didn’t account for.

Kylie walks past an apartment building where a woman is tossing her partner’s mattress & clothes to him from a window on the top floor. A different woman at street level is walking into a store on the first floor. By the time Kylie makes her fourth pass around? There are now four women tossing four times the clutter out the window; four mattresses on the street & multiple patrons being rained on by junk as they attempt to get into that store. 

Now take that one example and imagine every frame having similar multiplying background action. One man climbing a ladder eventually turns into an entire sidewalk full of men on ladders. A street fight between two motorcyclists turns into an all out brawl. Every new action introduces a tiny drop of chaos until those drops add up to a river pulling reality into its whirlpool.

The entire video was filmed, almost unbelievably, in a single take. Kylie and the extras hitting their cues and retracing their actions in slightly different positions each pass so that they can be digitally placed on top of each other to give the illusion of duplication. The fact that the task is pulled off without the extras bleeding into each other or seeming wildly out of place is nothing short of film magic. Or just impeccable planning. Gondry is regarded as a master of such visual tricks for a reason.

‘Come Into My World’ remains endlessly re-watchable to this day. Every new viewing reveals more details, more intersecting actions, more people you just didn’t even notice the first dozen times. It’s only fitting that the capstone to this long tail of success that was the Fever album keeps you hanging around and coming back for more, long after the fever itself should have died down.

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