From the restless mind of Michael Madrusan, proprietor of The Everleigh, comes Margaux, a bistro set below street level with a blink-and-you-miss-it entrance. Aside the subterranean door a film endlessly loops. Balletic in form, it channels the boardroom scene of Charlie Chaplin’s seminal ‘The Great Dictator'(1) where a megalomaniac prances with an air-filled globe, bouncing the world from finger to finger in a satirical dance.
In this signpost doubling as a film, the hand dances with wine bottles of all varieties and varietals, a further reference to the cinema classic ‘Cocktail'(2) where Tom Cruise and Bryan Brown parade to a Beach Boys soundtrack. Drinks are mixed to rounds of applause and bottles are pompously flung in the 80s spectacle of ‘bar flairing’. Absurd yet graceful, this juxtaposition short-circuits the two narratives to create another. In doing so Margaux asks you to get the joke; to take fun seriously.
“Signposting the venue with a projected film allowed us to distance it from the 1980s corporate office block it sits beneath. The projection, both ethereal and concrete, suggests ‘we’re here, but we’re not with them’” —Rhys Gorgol, Creative Director
Art Directors: Rhys Gorgol, Luke Brown
Client Service: Brooke Wallington
Videography: Wren Steiner
Photography: Wren Steiner