Music Video Breakdown: ‘Break My Heart’ by Dua Lipa

Building off of the success of her music video for the single “Physical,” Dua Lipa once again delivers high-energy theatrics in her latest video for “Break My Heart.” Lipa dropped her album “Future Nostalgia” shortly after the release of this video, enthralling diehard fans and casual pop-music lovers alike with the Taylor-Swift-esque angst, renewal, and energy of her empowering heartbreak anthems. The music video for “Break My Heart” is not unlike that of “Physical”— saturated colors, dizzying transitions, and lots of sexy Dua-Lipa-viewer eye contact — but instead of leaning into choreography, the “Break My Heart” video forgoes a coherent plot in favor of stunning visuals.

The video, which dropped on March 26, begins with a neon ‘80s title card, before panning to Lipa standing triumphantly on a car stuck in gridlock. She begins to sing with her signature look: apathetic, but sexy. As she moves among cars, space and time begins to warp and the first of many rapid transitions replaces the saturated lights of the city with an ‘80s-themed apartment as a full-size car flips into a toy one.

As she encounters the first (and incredibly irrelevant) man in the video, Lipa’s world tilts and the scenery collapses into a brightly colored dinner-club-performance-space hybrid. As Lipa enters, she gathers a crowd of back-up dancers and graces the neon light-up floor. Similar to her video for “Don’t Start Now” and many of her on-stage performances, Lipa does very little dancing herself. Instead, her back-up dancers swirl around her in monochromatic outfits while Lipa continues to strut forward in her color-blocked two piece, making much starker and sharper movements.

Amid her dancers, Lipa glances at a couple seated off-stage with an expression of simultaneous apathy and anguish before the back wall explodes, launching her into the next set (and costume change). She hurls through space until landing in the drab, inexplicably empty economy class of a plane, barely pausing before the next dizzying manipulation of her environment stretches the plane’s aisle into an endless echo of overhead compartments and weary travelers.

Without warning, the plane splits, leaving Lipa and her backup dancers, moonlighting as airline passengers, to strut through the gaping hole in the plane. Lipa is then overtaken by a yellow mass, and finds herself — fully dressed and made-up — in the bed of a confused man. She proceeds to rush through the open doorway, but just as she escapes the scene, the bedroom set slides to another presumably post-coital man, and then another. Lipa, in an appropriate response to this corruption of the space-time continuum, throws herself into a bubble bath.

From the bubbles of a girl’s night drink, Lipa emerges in her final outfit change — a red crop top and equally bright red plaid skirt — and resumes her strutting toward the camera without breaking eye-contact, while her backup dancers fall away into the neon scene behind her. In front of a circular window she pauses, just as the music ceases for a second before picking back up with renewed energy and launching Lipa through an even more rapid and whirling sequence of nonsensical but spatially stunning transitions. Lipa is thrown through all the previous scenes, finally finishing her odyssey through the explosion of space, color, and bodies on top of the video’s original car, blowing a bright pink bubble-gum bubble.

“Break My Heart” exemplifies the quintessential new era for Dua Lipa: extraordinary visuals filled with vivid color-blocking and mind-boggling manipulations of space, paired with vacantly sexy eye contact, all while strutting casually through explosions of artistic chaos that surround her.

— Staff writer Hannah T. Chew can be reached at hannah.chew@thecrimson.com.