Karim Sadli/Chanel.
Somewhere in the development of this campaign, someone at Chanel sat across a table from Alfonso Cuarón and said: ‘action film.’ And Cuarón, who has spent his career making films about children born into a dying world, a woman tumbling through space, a summer road trip that ends in grief, said yes. The result is the first action film in the house’s fragrance advertising history, and it is exactly as surprising and enjoyable as that sounds.
The film is for ‘Bleu de Chanel L’Exclusif,’ the newest and most concentrated version of the house’s signature masculine fragrance, and it stars Jacob Elordi as a man who breaks into a safe, retrieves the bottle and promptly loses it to a woman who is considerably quicker and more prepared than he is. A chase across the rooftops of an Asian city follows, then a martial arts duel in front of a blue agate wall, then a moment where Elordi’s character finally, triumphantly, gets the bottle back, and then a genderless third hand reaches in from off-screen and takes it. The philosophical joke underneath all of it, the one Cuarón commits to with a completely straight face, is that desire is more interesting than possession.
Karim Sadli/Chanel.
Karim Sadli/Chanel.
“Bleu de Chanel L’Exclusif is a dense, sophisticated and complex composition, in the manner of an extrait. A concentrate of exceptional raw materials. A majestic and mysterious interpretation of Bleu de Chanel,” says Olivier Polge, Chanel’s Perfumer Creator. What that translates to in practice is sandalwood, pushed further forward than in any of the other concentrations in the line, giving the fragrance a depth and warmth that sits on the skin.
Cistus labdanum pulls out the leathery, resinous character underneath, and the amber-woody structure gives the whole thing a presence that the Eau de Toilette, bright and citrus-led, was never designed to have. The four concentrations in the Bleu line are genuinely four different moods: the EDT sparkling and immediate, the EDP warmer and more voluptuous, the Parfum deep into cedarwood and New Caledonian sandalwood, and L’Exclusif sitting above all of them, fainter and more effortless.
The sandalwood itself comes from Maré, an island in New Caledonia, through an exclusive Chanel supply chain that has been in place long enough to have shaped the olfactory identity of the house’s fragrances. Only the heartwood is used, extracted through a bespoke process that makes this particular sandalwood different from any other on the market. Polge works with it accordingly.
Karim Sadli/Chanel.
Karim Sadli/Chanel.
The bottle is a perfect square with what the house calls “radical lines,” which is a very Chanel way of describing something that has simply refused all ornamentation. The campaign imagery, shot by Karim Sadli, is cool and blue-lit, Elordi appears in a dark suit against the kind of light that makes everything look like it is happening at 2am in a city that never quite sleeps.
Chanel has been making fragrance films since 1979, when Ridley Scott shot ‘La Piscine for N°5,’ and the lineage since then has leaned toward the cinematic and the emotional. Cuarón’s contribution is the first to have anyone doing a backflip. That feels like the right direction and something that proved to be of inspiration to Elordi himself, who’s recently discussed the experience on set comparing it to a spy film.
Discover the new ‘Bleu de Chanel L’Exclusif’ here.
photography. courtesy of Karim Sadli for Chanel
words. Gennaro Costanzo
