It’s the campaign everyone has been talking about since Timothée Chalamet and Martin Scorsese were first spotted running around New York shooting a secret project together last April – Chanel’s new short film for fragrance Bleu de Chanel is finally out and it might not be what you imagined.
A departure from the kinds of campaigns we’ve come to expect for fragrances – sensual, languid shots of people soaking up the sun in the Mediterranean – Scorsese has created a rapid, zany, at times manic film which sees Timmy play a “sort of caricature” of himself. Set to the Herbie Hancock tune “Rockit”, which helps create the intense atmosphere in a Challengers-esque way, we follow him as he appears in a film-within-a-film and then on a late-night show where he gives a frenzied Tom Cruise-esque performance.
Chalamet gets snapped out of his ennui by his co-star, Havana Rose Liu who you will know from Bottoms. She pulls him out of the black-and-white world he has been living in, into one of colour where he is finally free to be himself. Ultimately, Scorsese says, it’s about “the conflict between celebrity and staying true to being an artist” and not allowing the bright lights of fame to blind you to reality.
In behind-the-scenes footage released last year, Chalamet said working with Scorsese was a dream come true. “It’s one of the highest honours, if not the highest honour of my career, to get to work with Martin Scorsese in New York,” he shared. “I’m a New York boy, I’m a New York actor, I’m checking something huge off the personal bucket list.”
New York has been on his mind recently thanks to his upcoming portrayal of Bob Dylan in A Complete Unknown. “I’ve been thinking a lot about how life would’ve been in New York in the 60s,” he told Dazed last May when he was announced as the new face of Bleu de Chanel. “I keep ruminating on what it must have been like downtown at the time – mainly because living downtown is so expensive these days. What would it have been like when it was affordable and accessible, and at the same time so rich in art and culture?”
Watch the campaign above or read our full interview with Chalamet here.
