This video never quite felt like it did the song justice. “Taken” is a cool, sophisticated and very romantic number, but the video feels like it’s gone for laughs and blokey-sexy instead.
The video opens with Boh Runga cruising down the green-screen motorway, flirting with a couple of unremarkable guys who drive past. Boh makes a pit stop and has her vintage car serviced by the rest of the band who bumble around. Then Boh does some more hooning, proving she’s an independent woman because she drives her own car.
Then we see her driving through a bush-flanked road, standing up in the car and wearing what looks to be a blue bedsheet upcycled into a top. No one is driving the car (because it is on a trailer), but there’s no attempt to explain why this is. Maybe Boh is such an independent woman she can make her car drive itself.
She pulls over and the band are there again to polish her car. The motorway men appear and Boh stands seductively with her bedsheet top. But the blokes aren’t interested in her. They just want the car and are more interested in her petrolhead bandmates.
It all annoys me. It’s like the video is too scared to deal with the emotional sentiment of the song and so has just gone for the great music video cop-out of putting the band in a car. But then the song reached a very respectable #6 in the charts, so perhaps the video did a perfectly good job of promoting the song.
Best bit: Boh puts on her driving gloves while hooning down the motorway.
Next… the forest of unrequited love.