After a teaser last week, we finally get to see Chanel’s new short film called “Reincarnation”, a day ahead of the brand’s Paris-Salzburg show. The film was inspired by the story of Coco Chanel being influenced by an Austrian elevator operator’s jacket in the 1950s. The main players are Pharrell Williams, Cara Delevingne and Géraldine Chaplin. You also see appearances by Heidi Mount, Jamie Bochert, Baptiste Giabiconi and Brad Kroenig. Cara sings in the film as well with Pharrell performing “CC the World”, and she is not half bad.
How is it that Pharell sings off-key, the Austrian waitress sports a stupid tattoo on the nape, and all these ‘elites’ drawl empty phrases like East Side fashionistas instead of people of education? Lagerfeld may have an eye for style, but his sense of what makes film dialogue is laughable. ‘I have to go.’ ‘Darling, so nice to see you.’ The hostess of the Austrian restaurant sounds as flat and nasal as someone on the 3pm Mommy Run to the Dalton School in New York.
This is the second time I’ve tried to watch one of his films full of banal exchanges, smug smiling actors not in any character whatsoever, and the dismal sight of a decrepit Chaplin phoning it in.
Karl, we love you, but why is it your own interviews are more amusing that this? Why don’t you hire a genuine screenwriter?