An unexpected film premiere starring Brad Pitt and Penelope Cruz took place the other day at Paris Fashion Week. The director’s vision is a reference to Claude Lelouch’s classic 1966 new wave film Man and Woman, in which Anouk Aimée and Jean-Louis Trintignant play two widowed parents who meet for the first time at their children’s boarding school. This meeting sets off a series of events as their mutual attraction grows.
Pitt was unable to fly to Paris for the premiere as he is currently working on a feature film about Formula One racing. Cruz arrived at the screening to be personally present in the auditorium, where she was accompanied by Claude Lelouch. In the story, Hollywood stars Pitt and Cruz, dressed in classic evening gowns, are travelling in a car against the backdrop of Francis Le’s iconic soundtrack. However, in the scene in the restaurant, the roles are reversed from the original story. As the film’s creators explained, “the mutual understanding between women, which is the central theme of everything we do for Chanel, encourages Penelope’s decision to step up first.”
The film and clip are set in the French seaside town of Deauville, where the brand’s founder Coco Chanel opened her first fashion boutique in 1913 and served as inspiration for creative director Virginie Viard’s autumn collection. The original film won several awards, including the Grand Prix at the 1966 Cannes Film Festival and two Academy Awards for Best Foreign Language Film and Best Original Screenplay.
Chanel’s brand collaboration with Pitt began in 2012 when they chose him as the first male ambassador for their biggest hit fragrance, Chanel No.5. Cruz has been a brand ambassador since 2018, when she first appeared in an ad campaign shot by the late creative director Karl Lagerfeld. The actress took part in Lagerfeld’s autumn 2019 show. However, she first attended a Chanel show in 1999 and has regularly worn their clothes on the red carpet, including appearing in a spectacular black Chanel evening gown adorned with gold chains in Pedro Almodóvar’s film Open Arms (2009). Although Cruz and Pitt starred in Ridley Scott’s 2013 crime thriller The Counsellor, they had never acted in the same scene before.
