Is this too sexy for Canadian TV?
Chanel spot based on Bardot film can't air as is, says Television Bureau
April 19, 2007
What do you do for a lipstick's birthday? Clowns? Ponies? A sleepover? Not if you're Chanel.
For the first anniversary of Rouge Allure, a lipstick that comes in a tube that resounds with the irresistible click of a retractable pen, Jacques Helleu, the brand's artistic director, chose to pay tribute to a masterpiece of world cinema.
He hired esteemed photographer Bettina Rheims to direct a commercial in homage to Le Mépris (Contempt), a 1963 movie directed by Jean-Luc Godard and starring Brigitte Bardot at her most breathtaking.
In the award-winning Chanel tradition, it's a beautiful spot, but Telecaster Services of the Television Bureau of Canada has chosen not to approve it for broadcast, taking exception to what is perceived as nudity and asking for this and that to be pixelated or shadowed, and warning that even then the ad would get a Mature rating due to its suggestive nature. An M rating is used to advise television stations to air a commercial in programs with mature content.
Rather than tamper with Rheims' beautiful work, Chanel executives in Montreal decided not to submit to the suggested changes. "It would have really altered the integrity of the creation," says Anny Kazanjian, Chanel's director of public relations in Canada. "Although we were going to do a significant TV buy, we had to cancel those plans."
You could almost count on the ad showing up on the Internet and, yes, you can find it on YouTube and discover for yourself how boobish it is to see the commercial as anything but charming, witty, charged with sex, all to the heartbreaking tune of Georges Delerue's original music. Inspired by the opening sequence of the movie, in which a naked Bardot takes an inventory of her husband's love, starting with her feet – "Think they're pretty?"– moving on to ankles, knees ... ending with his declaration, "totally, tenderly, tragically," the Rouge Allure film stars Julie Ordon.
A Swiss model who up till now has been better known for having dated Stephen Dorff and Mark Wahlberg, Ordon, under a white sheet, reveals exquisite curve of her back, a gift for seduction and an appetite for control. She begins by asking, "Do you love my lips?" and ends by grabbing the lipstick and dragging it across her full mouth.
It could definitely be better 
