The New Chanel COCO Mademoiselle Crush Absolu Film

She is dressed, adorned in yards of fabric, powder brushed over her eyes.

The wind that will send it all swirling—Paris hopes for it as much as it fears the great flood. On screen, the city is Haussmannian, sculptural—façade is everything. Dim streetlights in deserted streets make the cobblestones gleam as the car rolls slowly by. Paris is at an age when she seeks balance between yesterday and tomorrow; she navigates dated conventions yet fears impropriety.

Paris awaits the ingredient, the presence, that will translate her into a light, chemically captivating formula. Concentrated, complex. Recognisable like all great perfumes. We speak, and Mademoiselle has flown away. A car like an open cage, no one inside. Strewn along the road, a jumble of things and fabrics. Coco kept her fragrance, that’s all she needs.

Freed, she races into the city. Bare legs and face, a boyish haircut, a white garment and her dark eyes. Minimal and sublime, she runs toward the unexpected.

As volatile as an electric current, she has neither keys nor plan. That’s why she moves so fast: she must create the road beneath her feet. The ingredient is her—you’ve been warned. Coco Mademoiselle knows nothing of Paris, but she will learn everything... or take it—it’s all the same to her. She never really learns, she doesn’t study. She tries, she lets herself jump, and there! She always lands on her feet.

But guardians of decorum stalk her, determined to put her back in her place, so she opens a door. She enters a lively café, like a postcard. Gradually, the café reveals the black-and-white lines of its Art Deco design, sharing with Coco Mademoiselle a genius for beauty and simplicity, for balance and contrast. Home at last. Coco’s heart flutters, she breathes, she laughs. Saved. And the café is saved as well, about to wake up to the grace of a Parisian night: generous, tangible, sensual.

Clack! With the strike of a heel against the floor, with her singular way of clapping her hands, Coco sends the blood rushing back to the heart. Is it her fragrance, her mood, her energy, her aura? Who can say? What she radiates has no name yet, but it is absolutely undeniable. In the room, the bodies she brushes past discover an unfamiliar suppleness, the temperature rises, and legs venture forward, hands clap—it’s contagious. More and more faces catch the light, and soon, joy radiates through the entire space. Everyone has a crush on Coco Mademoiselle. A dance begins that did not exist the night before. One hundred people become a single, beating, harmonious whole because one alone has entered. More kinetic than a ballet, happier than a trance, truer than any staged scene. The dance hovers somewhere between a ball and something unexpected. Most of all, it is very beautiful.

Soon standing atop the gilded bar, Coco Mademoiselle sends the rhythm pulsing into the very objects that surround her, and when nothing else can resist, she dives into the crowd of her dancers, fulfilled by the celebration she has created, forever radiating the formula she discovered at last. CHANEL.

Gracie Abrams for Chanel COCO Mademoiselle Crush Absolu