British-Japanese Pop singer Rina Sawayama’s ‘Hold the girl’ single was released on July 27th 2022. The entire album as a whole is an ode to Sawayamas struggles and traumas of her past, and ‘Hold the girl’ and the video that accompanies it are no exception. The video in its entirety deals with the difficulty and catharsis of moving forward from a difficult and complicated past. Â
The video sets off on a wide shot of a gloomy countryside landscape, with a 19th-century style home on the left. The image then cuts to a pan-shot of a pitch black hallway which
draws our attention to the illumined front door of the home, open just a crack. This imagery can be linked to Sawayamas unwillingness to leave her previous traumas behind despite wanting to, the door is open but she cannot leave. This theme of the unwillingness to leave and the feeling of being captive inside your own misery is recurrent throughout the video and can be further explored in this next sequence. The pitch black lighting transitions into a bedroom, where Sawayama is sat looking out of a window. Her ‘character’ (the word character being highlighted because we are told a story, however it is Moreso a fable to represent the conflict in Sawayama’s mind) Is dressed fittingly in a light 19th century tea gown. Sawayama lip-syncs the first verse of ‘hold the girl’ while transitioning her emotion from one of longing to determination, as her character climbs out of the window and stands on the roof. There is then a unconventual pause in the song. In this 8 second pause, we are at a close up panning out of Sawayama’s face and we hear the diegetic sounds of the wind whistling. The anticipation as the audience waits for the music to restart emphasizes the drama of the situation as Sawayamas ‘character’ questions her decision to jump. The morbidity of the situation she has placed herself in expresses the dire circumstances of her misery and her desperation to leave. This can also be viewed as a reflection on how people tend to look to the most severe solutions when there has been an open door to their escape the entire time.
Sawayama jumps off the roof, the beat drops, and the music restarts. The pace of the song quickens and sawayama falls as fast paced editing cuts of her from various camera angles display a rather traumatic fall, but sawayama simply wakes up in her bed, in the same bedroom as earlier. This enigma code may leave the audience in a state of confusion as it is difficult to understand why this may have happened to her. However, this could also relate to the overarching theme of the music video. She is dreaming about breaking free but cant actually bring herself to do it. Alternatively this specific sequence and the next one after it brings forth a new narrative element to be explored. Sawayama continues to try and escape the house, this time sprinting out the front door, but as she gets a small distance away from it she is lurched back by some ‘force’ and wakes up in her bedroom once more. This could signify that she is stuck in a time loop, struggling to get out and being placed in the exact same spot as before asif nothing ever happened. On the last attempt, rather than waking up in the bed again she is instead thrown against the closed door of the house, which she opens and walks through in a fury. The house as she re-enters is unstable and shaky, a possible reprisentation of her childhood and past she cant get away from
. The conditions of the house (her trauma) start to become harder to live in the more she tries to escape them. A hole appears in the floor of her house and sawayama starts reaching into it, in sync with the lyric in her song ‘reach inside and hold you close’. There is then a POV shift to first person as the camera shifts to an overhead
shot looking down into the hole. In it, we see a modern-dressed rina sawayama with various backup dancers surrounding her in a circle as she is in a fetal position. Her body language in that shot connotes to her childhood, and relates to the song's lyrics and healing of her ‘inner child’. We then get a sequence of rina performing to the song, with the shot switching from her with her dancers, then her reaching down into the hole from a nadir angle and then back again. Sawayamas dancers then lift her ‘inner child up’ reaching for the future her, to be held and understood. But then the loop starts again and sawayama watches through the window at an alternate version of hr running away from the house. She attempts to run away and this time she is finally free. Â