The warm, natural beauty of Isabella Rossellini is an Italian variation on a Swedish theme
Thirty-five smart people from New York City have flown down to Puerto Rico on an errand that is surpassingly silly but not at all foolish. They are filming a 30-second TV commercial intended to make every woman in Europe, where it will be shown, rush out to the corner parfumerie to buy a scent called Ô de Lancôme. To do this, their script says, they must make Puerto Rico look like the south of France.
But why should not Puerto Rico, which is very beautiful, look like itself? Because the client is a French company, and the client says so, that's why. Don't argue. Lancôme is paying a boxcarful of money for its whim (some $9,000 a day, or more than $1,100 an hour, for instance, just for the services of Star Model Isabella Rossellini), and arguing costs about $50 a word. So Nick LaMicela, the project's art director, has selected a quiet country road, with no palm trees to spoil the illusion of France. Somebody has found a French cowherd. Actually he is a Puerto Rican waiter, but in beret, smock and scarf, and with rouge on his round cheeks to suggest a history of drinking wine for breakfast, he looks as French as Pierre's pig.
Lancôme's expensive illusion is about to take form. Isabella is not in view yet; she is taking a 20-minute, or $375, nap. But LaMicela is at work, as are a film director, a cameraman, gofers, riggers and grips, and several black-and-white cows. The reason for all of this impressive activity—the concept, as agency philosophers put it—is that Ô de Lancôme is "a Saturday-afternoon fragrance." The woman who wears it is fresh and casual, and, although breathtakingly lovely, not obviously paired with a lover. Such a wild flower, as LaMicela explains with a poet's shy pride, might ride her bicycle alone down a country road some misty afternoon. She might glide round a bend, only to find the road blocked by a herd of cows. The cowherd, struck by her beauty, might shoo his beasts away, and she, touched by his courtesy, might hand him a flower from a bouquet she had gathered. Cut: and the noise you hear is millions of women stampeding to the drugstore.
Clearly, the entire fantasy depends on the rare beauty of the bicyclist. Doubts fall away as Isabella appears. The commercial is no longer silly, and Lancôme is getting its money's worth ($325,000 for 35 days a year, said to be the richest contract ever signed by a model). More than its money's worth, since she is six months pregnant. But no one seems troubled by that; if Cheryl Tiegs and Lauren Hutton established a few years ago that it is fine for models to be 30, Isabella's age now, Rossellini seems to have brushed away objections to pregnancy. The camera will simply dodge where it can.