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| 1991 | ||||||||||||||||||
| LOLITA 91 - Sky, UK | ||||||||||||||||||
| When she was 14 and had a teen pop hit with "Joe le Taxi," people would spit at her in the streets. Now Vanessa Paradis is 18 and is destined to be one of the faces of the 90's. She's transformed herself from cute bubblegum pop star to fully-fledged enfant du rock, courtesy of video guru Jean-Baptiste Mondino, and is currently starring in a TV advert for Chanel directed by style supremo Jean-Paul Goude. And her first film Noce Blanche, just released here, has won her a Cesar, the French equivalent of an Oscar. Tom Hibbert met her in Paris. Clutching a straw in her dainty hand, Vanessa Paradis dabs and stabs at the cubes of ice in her glass of chic spa water. And she sighs. "It is sooo deeficult," she says. "Always I cannot use English proper and I hope I don't look stupid in my explanations." Extraordinarily shy is Mademoiselle Paradis, but when she loses grip of her schoolgirl English, which is often, she is angry at herself so she jabs her ice cubes, sighs and, through the becoming gaps in her teeth, hisses two unsavory words, "Merde" and "sheeet." Possibly you remember Vanessa Paradis, the French celebrity with the face of a street urchin/angel. Four years ago she was often to be seen on the telly swaying, in bashful style, beside a checkered cab as she mimed the words to her flopsy Euro-hit "Joe le Taxi" in a video. The kind of disgraceful dads who once lusted over Pan's People on Top of the Pops, and would come over all a-quiver whenever the camera panned up a thigh or Babs blew them one of her "kisses," now slavered over Vanessa. But careful, father! Vanessa was jailbait. She was 14 years old. Today, as she sits in a grey sweater, blue jeans, and sunglasses, in the expensive bar of an expensive Paris hotel, she has become a WOMAN. Eighteen -- though the baby-tot visage is not greatly altered. She has won a César (French equivalent of an Oscar) as "best young female hope" in her first film, Noce Blanche (White Wedding as Billy Idol would put it). In the beginning the French public did not much care for Vanessa Paradis. They would shout terrible things like "slut" and "whore" if they spotted her in the street. "I cannot explain this," says Vanessa, looking sad. "It was a mélange of jealousy and normal reactions. When you see a girl who is fourteen years old who has success and money with a beautiful life, sometimes you get jealous and I don't know why." She performed at the French music festival MIDEM, and the audience booed and were generally unkind. "It was 'orrible," says Vanessa looking yet more sad. "Merde... it was shit. The people, they start to hate me and say bad things to me. They were bored about 'Joe le Taxi' and they were not understand me -- I was bored about 'Joe le Taxi' also." The French have never taken pop music very seriously. They have Jean Michel Jarre and they have the so-called French Elvis -- Johnny Halliday -- and they once had the overwrought Edith Piaf, and er, that's about it. A wispy, swaying gamine, i.e. V. Paradis, was not designed to appeal to them. They worship The Cure for The Cure are mad. Les movies, however, are a different kettle of poisson. The French consider films to be some sort of high ART. So once Vanessa had appeared in Noce Blanche (un film écrit et mis en scène par Jean-Claude Brisseau) as Mathilde -- schoolgirl, ex-prostitute, ex-junkie, flawed-but-beautiful etc. etc. -- the young entertainer become acceptable, palatable, a STAR. Even though Noce Blanche is, to be entirely frank, entirely dreary. What happens is that Mathilde, the "foxiest" girl in the class, is much given to talking about Freud and writing things like, "When x lies between 1/2 and infinity, f is positive, hence f of x is less than 3/4 to infinity" (whatever that means) upon the blackboard, and this impresses her schoolmaster (Bruno Cremer), who's old enough to be her dad, so much that he encourages all her clothes to fall off at regular intervals and.... Well, the French simply adore that sort of stuff, don't they. May/December romance... they practically invented it. So Vanessa Paradis, the once and future pop singer, is now considered a proper actress and they are comparing her to Françoise Dorleac, to Catherine Deneuve, to Brigitte Bardot.... Vanessa Paradis lights another of her low-tar cigarettes, shyly puffs away and ponders the Bardot comparison. Brigitte Bardot, born Camille Javal in 1933, pulchritudinous, films including Doctor at Sea (1955, in which despoiled by Dirk Bogarde), and And God Created Woman (1956)... For whom the term "sex kitten" was invented. "Merde," says Vanessa gently. "I do not like this. Everytime when somebody gets success you have to say, 'She is the new la-la-la or he is the new la-la-la.' Shit, it's so stupid. I like Brigitte Bardot, she is one of the most beautiful girls in the world, but she's not my model. I have no model. I am just me. "If I have to have models, I suppose they will be Marilyn Monroe and James Dean. It is difficult to meet Marilyn Monroe and James Dean." Indeed it is. They're dead. "But these people keep me dreaming. Marilyn Monroe. James Dean. Robert DeNiro. My biggest dream is to be at Woodstock and see Jimi 'endrix. But that is impossible." Indeed it is, 'endrix dead and Woodstock too.... "It was my first movie, Noce Blanche. I was very, how do you say? -- merde -- I was naive. I had to prove I am not only the little girl who sing 'Joe le Taxi' and make the little girl photos in the magazines. But, ha ha, it was so hard to do to be nude in front of thirty persons on the movie and think there will be lots of people to see me nude in the cinema. But I did it and I knew that I don't want to know it again." Paradis has received countless film part offers since Noce Blanche. All of them rubbish, naturally. Men with a filmsy Noce Blanche II-type script looking for further bosom-exposure and easy money. Vanessa Paradis is growing up. She just says NO. "When I was young, I was dreaming all the time of this world of pop music and of the movie and thinking it was a wonderful world, but it's not. I meet very many 'orrible people in these worlds. There is 'orrible men who want for my shirts to come off, there is old men at home looking at my child's face and -- how do you say? -- fantasize 'orrible things of me. I hate to think about all that. But I have grown up. I grew up in sixteen hours. At first, with 'Joe le Taxi,' you saw a little girl of fourteen years old with a baby face, but now you see me a WOMAN. She is eighteen. This is easier to accept...." Vanessa Paradis, daughter of a once impoverished house painter whose career went upswing into interior decoration when mother started doing the accounts (maman is the one who fusses about Vanessa's lolly, too), recalls her teenage schooldays. Once the waify girl had become famous, school was HELL.... "It was HELL!" With a single, sharp poke she has demolished an ice cube. "HELL! 'orrible. It was bad. It was not the life I wanted. I had to take a train to school and the train would be full of people at eight in the morning, one hundred and five thousand people that I don't know if they are loving me or hating me, but it seems that they are hating me and I feel so alone. Everyone is hating me. And then I get to school and always I am trying to explain to the teachers, yes I am famous person but I am normal person, so teachers don't have to be much worse with me or much more nice with me. They must be normal, treat me like all the others. But they don't. They are worse with me. They are 'orrible. They always shout. I always cry...." It is too sad. I can hardly bear it... It is about to get worse. Vanessa wishes to tell me, as she spears at the ice and whispers "merde" and "shit" between those awesomely becoming gaps in her teeth, that she wants to do something on behalf of this, our ailing, ghastly planet. Brigitte Bardot is very nice to baby seals and gets horrendously cross with people in fur coats. What will be Vanessa's gift to our future happiness and survival? "There is lots of things, so many things, who concern me. When I see a little child who have nothing to eat, I feel so sad. But it is difficult because everybody want me to get involved with some very big cause but if you help everybody who cannot be -- merde -- credible! You have to be concerned on one thing and at this moment I cannot find just one thing. So I try to just have pleasure with my job and to make people dream even though my fan mail includes many letters saying 'orrible things like, I write to you because I hate you. That is not very nice. All I want is to make people dream...." Is that so very much to ask? On her last LP Vanessa Paradis was "produced" by the late Serge Gainsbourg. Possibly you recall Serge Gainsbourg. He was the fellow who grumbled away whilst wife Jane Birkin did all that heavy breathing on the banned Euro-hit of yesteryear, "Je T'Aime... Moi Non Plus." He went on to record a pervy segment with his and Jane's daughter, Charlotte, titled "Lemon Incest." Then he went on a television chat show opposite Ms. Whitney Houston and drunkenly declared to the world that he wanted to fuck her (Whitney). Then he produced Vanessa's LP, which featured a version of Lou Reed's "Walk on the Wild Side" because Paradis feels a certain empathy with Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground for some unknown reason... Serge was, according to Vanessa (now into her 18th cigarette), a "tenderness man. Merde, does I make sense proper?" Vanessa will be making more pop music records when, if, she finds the right producer; more movies if and when the right non-clothes-disappearing-script comes along. Money is not a problem. She is modelling for Chanel -- the Coco Chanel range of smells. "I am now so happy," she says, as she spears the ice that has all but melted and draws on a fag and sighs and looks sad. "So happy...." I don't think so... "I am a very normal person. I make motorbikes with my friends, like everybody. Life to me is very strange. There is just one thing I ask of you: please -- merde! -- please do not hate me...." Hating Vanessa Paradis was the last thing on my mind. She bared her teeth with all those childlike gaps and she left, bless her. |
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