JULIE DELPY just smokes and smokes and smokes. This just happens to be the opening sentence of a recent magazine article about the beautiful and richly talented French actress. She’s very much in the news just now because of the film 2 Days in Paris, which she not only stars in but also wrote and directed.
To French women in general, and to actresses in particular, cigarettes are an essential accessory, though far more of a sexual accessory than a fashion accessory. Jeanne Moreau, Brigitte Bardot, Annie Giradot, Catherine Deneuve, Juliette Binoche and Ludivine Sagnier have all used cigarettes to telling effect in their films.
Eva Green, that other actress who co-starred in the last 007 movie Casino Royale, captured the essence of the cigarette for French culture when she was asked what she did for relaxation. “I’m French and I’m lazy,” she replied, “which means I smoke and I don’t exercise.”
Alas, she is going to have to be a bit more choosy in future as to where she smokes, because France has followed Ireland’s example and banned smoking in cafes, bars and restaurants. How disciplined the French will be in this regard remains to be seen, but that’s another story.
What is not going to change is that women will continue to smoke - in France and elsewhere - because they have an instinctive sense that smoking is sexy, and that a cigarette is a sexual asset, and one through the use of which (even in the way it is held) “attitude” can be wordlessly conveyed and expressed.
Just think of all the movies in which women, cigarettes, attitude and sex have been inextricably linked. Sharon Stone’s portrayal of a sassy and manipulative femme fatale in Basic Instinct (1992) and would not have been nearly as effective sans cigarettes. It is hard to see how the famous (or infamous) scene in the police station where she nonchalantly lights a cigarette, and then brazenly crosses her legs, could have worked without the cigarette.
In Steven Spielberg’s 2005 film Munich (about Israeli revenge for the massacre of members of their 1972 Olympic team), there is a key scene where a beautiful female assassin is seen languidly smoking in a hotel bar before attempting to pick up the leader of the Israeli hit squad. Again, the cigarette and what it conveyed are essential ingredients of this scene.
The way things are going, however, it is only in movies that such scenes can be witnessed in the future. The sight of an attractive female using a cigarette to convey the essence of cool, or of availability, in a public bar is becoming a rarer and rarer sight. More’s the pity, I say.
It is a sentiment that would undoubtedly be echoed by Alfred Hitchcock were he still alive today. The great film director had a very keen sense of the symbolic value of the cigarette as part of the sexual apparatus of women. Just think of the initial encounter between Cary Grant and Eva Maria Saint in North by Northwest, or the sight of Tippi Hedren casually smoking while unaware of the threatening gathering of crows in The Birds.
And it’s not just film stars who love cigarettes. All the top models smoke - the likes of Naomi Campbell, Kate Moss, Sophie Dahl, Linda Evangelista, and Heidi Klum. Some say they do it because it helps them to control their weight. The truth, though, is that they use cigarettes as vehicles of empowerment. To say all this of course is to invite charges of political incorrectness, or worse. Do I care?
