Almost five years after Nicole Kidman and director Baz Lurman collaborated on the first Chanel No. 5 mini-movie, French actress Audrey Tautou has replaced the Australian beauty as the face of the famous French perfume and teamed up with Amelie filmmaker Jean-Pierre Jeunet for the next installment.
She will appear as the mysterious heroine of a two minute advertisement for the top fragrance brand, which will debut next month. The short film, which took four months to make, shows Tautou pursued by a handsome stranger on the Orient Express train to Istanbul. It was shot last May on location in Istanbul, train stations in Nice and Limoges, central France, as well as in a Paris studio. It hits the internet in full form on May 5 - 88 years to the day after Coco Chanel first introduced her legendary fragrance.
Her new role as spokesmodel coincides with the upcoming release of her movie Coco avant Chanel, which documents the rise of the fashion icon from cabaret singer to design guru, but a representative for Chanel No. 5 insists the two are not connected.
“Coco Chanel's personality was absolutely extraordinary but beyond her genius and talent she has everything that the heroine of any great novel has," Tautou told France Inter radio. "She was a very hard, very authoritarian, very proud character and at the same time, this was a period of her life when her character wasn't entirely formed," she added.
Chanel, who died in 1971, brought a new simplicity to women's clothes after the elaborate styles of the pre World War One "Belle Epoque" and the little black cocktail dress she created in 1926 remains a fashion staple to this day.
"A woman without a perfume is a woman without a future," she once declared and she backed her own future by creating "Chanel No. 5," which became the biggest selling scent of all time.
