Vanessa Paradis has been called many things. She has been criticized for being competently marketed and little else. Graffiti labeling her a "slut" appeared regularly around her Paris apartment until she moved into the suburbs. She's been branded a Lolita with no future. Inevitably, she has been called a bimbo. But the 14-year-old who sang "Joe le Taxi" with sugar-sweet vocals and a knowing look has confounded her critics. The song sold around two million copies worldwide, and was followed by her native country's "singer of the year" award in 1990 as well as critical acclaim and a Cesar for her film Noce Blanche. "I'm still seen as a sexy Lolita," she admits. "I'm bored of this. People in France realize I have something to say, but it's harder in English, I don't feel I can so articulate..." It's also harder to listen to her voice, which sounds as though she's high on helium. But still, Paradis offers a determined defense of "Joe le Taxi"; no, she doesn't cringe when she hears it now. "Of course I'm still proud of it! It made me happy. Nobody thought it'd be a success. It was when the machine began, I had to start growing up with a job and responsibility." As for her job as the new Coco Chanel girl, "At first I thought it was a joke, then it was wonderful. I was afraid because I'm definitely not a model, I'm trying to be a singer and actress. I'll be the new face of Chanel, but all I really want to be is Vanessa Paradis." She says she hears music day and night and can't live without it, while films are a way of becoming someone else for a while, but the two don't always mix easily. "I did Noce Blanche two-and-a-half years ago. I'm a little... upset. I needed to make another movie, but the scripts were so bad. They don't see what is me. And now I'm so involved with music, the good ones come. I wish I could do both."

"Why do you ask me about Kille Minog? I don't care about Kille Minog." Vanessa Paradis is the 18-year-old Parisian with the doll-like face and Bardot lips, the girl in the new television commercial for Coco Chanel perfume, the same girl who, as a 14-year-old, sang the Euro-hit "Joe le Taxi," one of only a handful of French songs to top the charts in other countries.

Her contract with Chanel is said to be worth £250,000, and has made her France's leading cover girl, pouting out on everything from TV guides to Vogue. But this high-profile money spinner is not the sole reason why Paradis emits the self-assurance of someone who knows her star is in the ascendant.

In France at least, she seems finally to have convinced her country folk that she's more than some Nineties Lolita. Last year she picked up a French Oscar -- the Cesar -- as most promising newcomer in the film Noce Blanche, in which she played a manipulative, druggy schoolgirl who seduces her teacher.

She's also started working on an album with Lenny Kravitz in New York and L.A. She declines to comment on his sex appeal, fielding the question with a sensible answer saying how "impressive" he is to work with, and what a "nice" person he is. The follow-up to her second album, made with Serge Gainsbourg before his death in 1991, the record will be written mainly by Kravitz and released in the autumn. ... [She] says of her album, "My music's in English and it'll be released in America first. Then we'll see how to deal with the French. I can't sing completely in English. I'm a French girl!" ... In the meantime, Jean-Baptiste Mondino's extraordinary video for her "Tandem" single guaranteed her heavy rotation on MTV this year.

The 30-second-long Chanel ad is also the product of a high-profile collaboration, this time with Jean-Paul Goude, the respected French photographer and video director who launched Grace Jones' career and organized France's spectacular bicentennial parade in Paris. He found Paradis to be the complete professional; eschewing the services of a double, she learned to use a trapeze so that Goude could film her as a bird on her "perch" in a giant cage.