Citroën and BETC Paris Can't Stop Warping Reality

When your dreams are just like car commercials

First, you spy giant coffee cups and garden gnomes floating outside the window. Next, you’re stealing your neighbor’s C5 Aircross with a bunch of cops along for the ride.

It’s either a dream or Citroën’s latest oddball commercial. In fact, it’s both.

In recent years, the automaker and BETC Paris have become adept at crafting spots that embrace absurdity. So, it seems fitting that the team channels dreaming itself for a new advert.

In the :90 below, an everyman-type keeps waking up inside weird visions, blurring the line between fantasy and reality.

Director Fredrik Bond weaves a happily hallucinogenic tale with a twist at the end:

“Some products just change your notion of what’s possible,” says agency CD Nick Bakshi. “That’s the effect we wanted to convey. We wanted to show how it feels to step inside a car that seems too good to be true—until you realize it’s real.”

Richard Sanderson’s floaty track “Reality” deepens the mood as our hero applies dream logic one time too many.

Past Citroën work in a similar vein includes this crazed take on the French Revolution; a close encounter of the rudest kind; this colorful confetti celebration; and a hair-raising CGI bear chase through the forest.