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Section: ROCK & ROLL

AGAINST A BRILLIANTLY colored dreamscape, a mother rocks a little girl by the sea while a ship floats in midair behind them. The girl climbs out of her mother's arms, gets on a tricycle and, with the magic of video, pedals her way through Kenya, Russia, Spain, New York and India before ending up back home. In this visually stunning clip for Deep Forest's "Sweet Lullaby," director Tarsem retells in his own way the myth of the Hindu god Ganesh's trip around the world.

Tarsem's last video, R.E.M.'s "Losing My Religion" (1991), made believers out of those who doubted videos could be as artful as the music they sell. But it took him a full three years to find a song that inspired him enough to make another. Once he heard the haunting melody of "Sweet Lullaby," a song sung by a girl from the Solomon Islands, he was hooked.

French producers Eric Mouquet and Michel Sanchez, who make up Deep Forest, set the South Pacific lullaby to a rhythm track that intercuts Eurodance music and Central African Pygmy chants. The result, "Sweet Lullaby," is suddenly everywhere--a year after its CD release.

The video is as much a cross-cultural odyssey as the music is. Simple gestures and images are repeated from country to country, yet each location is tinted a different hue, alluding to both the universality and the exoticism of the song. As for possible charges of exploitation of the native cultures from which the producers "borrowed," Mouquet says they tried to complement rather than "overpower the beauty" of the music they sampled. For his part, Tarsem had the producers send him each track of the recording before he consented to do the project. "When I heard it all separately," he says, "I realized how much their input had come in."

The most striking sequences are vibrant tableaux interspersed throughout the clip, based on the work of visionary Armenian filmmaker Sergei Paradjanov (Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors). Tarsem had previously wanted to incorporate that director's style into an ad hewas shooting but got a chilly reception. "I showed Paradjanov to Kodak, and they said, `That's not the kind of thing the new generation would like,'" Tarsem says. "Now, I get calls from ad agencies every week saying, `We want you to do another commercial just like this.'"

Tarsem shot the video on a whirlwind schedule, arriving on location one day and shooting the next. His 4-year-old niece, who plays the globe-trotting girl, soon tired of the glamour of video making. "She hadn't been outside her house [in England] her entire life," he says. "She loved New York because it was where Kevin got lost [in Home Alone 2]. After that, it was just hell."

A temperamental star was the least of the problems. The director and crew turned up in Moscow during last year's attempted coup against Russian president Boris Yeltsin and were allowed to shoot near Red Square only after soldiers checked the tricycle for bombs. In India, Tarsem was luckier. He wanted to film boys jumping off the roof of a temple submerged in the Ganges but discovered when he got there this phenomenon occurred only five days a year. It just so happened he arrived right on time.

PHOTO: Art view: A recurring video image

PHOTO: Deep Forest's Sanchez and Mouquet and director Tarsem (from left)

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By Al Weisel