Chapter and verse on the journey of Hennessy X.O Cognac
Nicolas Winding Refn, if you’ve ever seen any of his movies (Drive, Valhalla Rising, Only God Forgives), is a visceral director, with a knack for capturing impact and emotion in bold ways. So when Hennessy X.O Cognac decided to create an audio-visual journey for its new Odyssey campaign, Refn was the man.
The concept of Odyssey was the complex notes of Hennessy X.O Cognac distilled into a voyage of chapters, each representing one of seven tasting notes flowing seamlessly into the other. Refn’s task was to capture that in sound and graphics.
Driven by a pulsating bass that Hans Zimmer would be proud of, the Odyssey video starts of with striking images of clouds and water. Sinuous chords enter the music and the chapters begin to unfold. Striking images, representing the primordial elements – fire, water, earth, metal, wood – coil around a melody that keeps building and building like Ravel’s Bolero, adding complexity and intricacy to the composition. At first, the images might seem arbitrary – a gold-painted youth in a Native American headpiece, segueing into an exploding copse of trees; but they aren’t. “Taste in a powerful sense,” Refn notes, and the idea of Odyssey is that all the disparate, distinct tastes each evoking different optics come together in a single sip, a single taste of Hennessy X.O Cognac.
The spirit of the campaign is contemporary, eschewing traditional references to heritage and history, focusing instead on the intense cascade of flavours concentrated in the product. As a piece of theatre, Odyssey X.O skirts the edge of avant garde, reminding us of a surrealistic Remedios Varo painting or a Björk music video. As a representation of the cognac, Odyssey X.O is a visceral punch equal to the rich palate of Hennessy X.O.
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