Vincent Cassel spends most of his newest music video getting shot, bloodied, and yelled at through a walkie-talkie. He’s not complaining. He’s acting.
Charli XCX dropped “Camera” on Tuesday, the fourth and final single from her upcoming album Music, Fashion, Film, and it might be the strangest rollout move of her career: handing the screen almost entirely to a 59-year-old French film icon and staying, for most of the runtime, just out of frame.
A Desert Set, Fake Blood, and One Very Bad Take
Shot in black and white, the video opens on Cassel mid-meltdown, snapping into a phone while a makeup team dabs fake blood onto his face. He’s playing an actor stuck reshooting a violent desert scene that keeps falling apart. A squib misfires on the first take. It works too well on the second, sparking off an overheated light and ruining the shot anyway. Cassel just keeps going, staggering through his own death scene again and again, visibly furious every time someone yells cut.
For a Charli XCX video, the choice to center someone else this hard is a swerve. She turns up on a moving camera dolly, dressed in a floral shirt and cropped trousers, gesturing at Cassel like she’s the one running the shoot. It’s a performance, not a job title — the video was actually directed by Aidan Zamiri, the collaborator behind nearly every visual of this era, from “Rock Music” to “Wink Wink” to Charli’s mockumentary The Moment. Inside the story the video is telling, though, she’s the director. Cassel is just trying to survive her notes.
The Album’s Last Piece Falls Into Place
“Camera” completes a rollout that’s been unusually literal about its own concept. Music, Fashion, Film has doled out one theme per single: “Rock Music” carried the music, “SS26” carried the fashion, and now “Camera” carries the film — right down to casting an actual film star and building a video that’s essentially a short about the misery of filmmaking.
It’s also the most reflective song of the four. Without repeating her lyrics here, the track finds Charli turning inward on her own pivot toward acting, weighing whether chasing a screen career this late makes sense against turning 34 in less than two weeks. She’s not speaking hypothetically. She’s already appeared in The Moment and Erupcja, and she stars in I Want Your Sex, which hits theaters on July 31 — a week after the album itself lands.
What’s Actually Coming Out of All This
Music, Fashion, Film arrives Friday via Atlantic, an 11-track project that reportedly closes with a feature from director David Cronenberg. Before the video dropped, Charli had already previewed “Camera” live at a run of small pop-up shows in Brooklyn, New York, and London earlier this month — the kind of low-capacity shows that tend to signal an artist is confident enough in new material to test it in front of a crowd before the official release.
The bigger machinery kicks in after that. Charli’s booked for a run of major festivals, including Lollapalooza and Outside Lands, and she’ll launch a full North American arena tour on September 11 in Philadelphia, wrapping in Las Vegas on October 23. It’s the victory lap for an artist whose last album, Brat, hit No. 3 on the Billboard 200 in 2024 and picked up the Grammy for Best Dance/Electronic Album the following year — a reminder that even her most experimental swerves, like handing a music video over to a French character actor for three minutes, tend to land.
