Nicole Kidman Tribute: Chanel N°5: The Film (2004)

by Cláudio Alves

If someone asked me to come up with the definitive image of Nicole Kidman, I'm not sure I'd gravitate toward her work in movies or TV, nor even her red-carpet appearances. Instead, my mind would instinctually drift to that shot of industrial-grade glamour that once played at every primetime ad break. It's a Moulin Rouge! reunion and, in its way, a miniature remake with a contemporary twist. It's fashion distilled into a dream, a bespoke Lagerfeld-designed wardrobe, and a fragrance we can only imagine through the screen. It's Old Hollywood resurrected for 180 seconds of hyper-artifice and soft-focus glow, so beautiful it makes your heartache. It's Chanel N°5: The Film, of course…

This may be nostalgia talking, but has Nicole Kidman ever looked more beautiful than she does in this perfume commercial? No. But then, a particular Australian auteur wouldn't want anyone to call it a commercial to begin with. Despite the project's mercenary origins as an advertisement for Chanel's famous eau de toilette, director Baz Luhrmann insisted it wasn't so. Instead, he conceived it as a sort of short film. But that's not right either. Because this piece doesn't feel like one, evoking a trailer instead. It's the trailer for some picture that was never made, a feature that only exists within the borders of Luhrmann's imagination.

Moulin Rouge! is the obvious reference from which it all developed as part of a series meant to draw other star directors to Chanel. However, Luhrmann kept true to his magpie predilections, borrowing from more movie history to conceive this little delight of his. Rather than the tragedy of Orpheus and his Euridice set to jukebox can-can, this would be a modern spin on Wyler's Roman Holiday. Or, at least, that's how it plays. Consider that basic premise, when a princess escapes from her duties to spend a secret sojourn in the company of a journalist with whom she falls in love. The romance is temporary, as she must return to her life in the limelight.

So yes, it's Roman Holiday with a big screen star and a metropolitan Bohemian instead of a royal and a reporter. The setting is a fairytale version of New York that Catherine Martin designed for her husband and most faithful collaborator, using digital wizardry to morph the scant footage of the city into an impression rather than a direct representation of it. Mandy Walker is behind the camera, already exploring the possibilities of color bleeding into black-and-white photography, remixed in post by Daniel Schwarze's juxtaposition-heavy cutting. In these mechanisms, just as it looks back to Hollywood's yesteryear, Chanel N°5: The Film also points forward.

You can almost glimpse Elvis in that gilded horizon. Or The Great Gatsby, for that's what Martin's cityscape beckons into the imagination. And just like that Fitzgerald adaptation, the beautiful blonde is framed as something as fragile as unreachable, perchance even to herself. She has no name, only the idea of celebrity as her defining feature, and Kidman plays her with appropriate broadness. Most of all, she exists as an aesthetic phenomenon for Luhrmann's gaze. Watch as she runs through Times Square in slow-motion, a feathered skirt giving the impression of a fallen angel trying to escape the paparazzi flashes. There's no better prelude for a meet-cute.

On her flight, the star enters a taxi with an occupant already inside. It's Rodrigo Santoro as our everyman whose eyes see the real woman beneath the silver screen façade. And yet, the formal arrangement makes Kidman look more otherworldly than she ever has, a reverie of impossible perfection who demands your love at first sight. In a breathy exhale, she commands the cabbie to drive away, and so they go into a love story that can only exist in stolen moments, a liminal space far away from real life or whatever's close to mundanity in this glitzy cosmos of Luhrmann's making. 

High up, close to the heavens, a rooftop flat shall be the stage for intimacies forbidden by one's status. And so, Kidman's star is free to giggle and joke, to play the part of an anonymous dancer while the world outside roars to the scandal of her vanishing. Every emotion is played in poses that convey a sense of sentimental extremis without the actors needing to demonstrate too much on camera. In quick succession of shots, many bleeding into one another, we experience the whirlwind romance and its inevitable dissolution. We see the sorrow, but the quickness inspires euphoria. Luhrmann may be selling perfume, but he's getting the audience drunk in audiovisual ambrosia.

With Rodrigo Santoro, Kidman makes up one of the most gorgeous couples in the history of the moving image, so their separation hurts. If not at a deep level of character-based affection, then in that visceral pull of the eye, the visuals commanding the heart. Their union is a gorgeous sight that we want to prolong, but she must return, back in the pink feathers and perfectly loose curls. Freedom from herself was but a dream, and it's time to wake up. But something persists in the coda, for the experience of love is enough to make it immortal and stronger than anything. Haven't you seen Moulin Rouge!?

So, separated by an unthinkable distance, the lovers glance at each other. A knowing smile blossoms across her porcelain visage and her naked back turns to us, framed in black to better showcase a diamond necklace worn in reverse. It's the brand that remains on-screen, but it's the aesthetic-based emotion that resounds within the viewer. Or maybe it's the crescendo of Craig Armstrong's take on Clair de Lune by Debussy, serving as backdrop for Santoro's lovestruck reading of "As she forgotten? I know I will not. Her kiss, her smile, her perfume." Even thinking about it, I'm transported back to my early teens, overwhelmed and awed, a bit in love, in front of the TV.

Luhrmann and Kidman find the perfect combination of deluded sincerity, finesse and pretentiousness to make it work. The result is a ravishment of the highest order that might not be ideal for selling perfume, but it communicates a dream of beauty like nothing else. After various cineastes have tried their hand at high-fashion advertising – Sorrentino, Guadagnino, Baker, and so many others – Chanel N°5: The Film remains the platonic ideal. Is it silly to look at it with such endearment? Perhaps, but I never said I wasn't silly. And besides, a Nicole Kidman Tribute seems like the perfect opportunity to rhapsodize about her bigger-than-life beauty and blinding star power.

Previously in the Nicole Kidman TFE Tribute: 

• Introductiom (1983-1989) - Early Australian films
• Billy Bathgate (1991) – her first Golden Globe nomination!
• Malice (1993) - when Kidman met Sorkin
• To Die For (1995) - her first Golden Globe win!
• The Portrait of a Lady (1996) - a Campion experiment
• Practical Magic (1998)  - comfort food cinema
• Eyes Wide Shut (1999)- Kubrick. Cruise. Kidman.
• Moulin Rouge! (2001) - her first Oscar nomination!
• The Others (2001) - a foray into horror
• The Hours (2002) - the Oscar victory!
• Dogville (2003) - Lars von Trier's masterpiece
• Birth (2004) - her best performance ever?

After this detour into the land of perfumery and couture, let's go back to the cinema. Next in the Nicole Kidman Tribute, we have The Stepford Wives Frank OZ remake.

Comments

[thevoid99]

Now that is how you do an ad.

[Drew]

Claudio, I am glad you included this in Nicole's tribute.
The whole thing is so cinematic and nobody sold glamour like Nicole. It screams "prestige ads"!

[Mark Brinkerhoff]

I love everything about this ad: the art deco, the Debussy, the “Drive!”, the glamour, the menswear. (“I love to dance” Kidman looks sensational in menswear.) Especially love that Kidman wore *this* dress, as a tribute to Lagerfeld, to the Met Gala just last year. https://youtu.be/p247KTODQLU?si=-QYH2ct1z-Lu4ZEo