Tuesday, January 30, 2007

Catherine Deneuve For . . .

In France and the rest of Europe - and likely in Canada, given the French-speaking population in Quebec - Catherine Deneuve is best known as a cinema actress. In the United States, alas, she's probably better known as a pitchwoman. :-O She has endorsed many a product in this country, which she does to give herself the freedom to do movies for artistic, not commercial, reasons (although it doesn't always work out like that).


Her most famous endorsement is for Chanel perfume, of course, but she's also endorsed watches (as depicted above), American Express, and cars. One car she did a TV ad for in particular was Ford's Mercury Monarch from the mid-seventies, which made less than zero sense. Having actually driven one of those things, I can tell you that the Monarch was everything our heroine is not - ponderous, unstylish, and boring. It also had crude engineering, which was a far cry from the intricate engineering of, say, French cars. . . and its soft ride was so un-European!

Needless to say, while I'm a big fan of Catherine Deneuve, I'm not a big fan of her ad campaigns. Aside from having been relentlessly parodied, they've completely overshadowed her reputation as an actress in These States. I've actually posted pictures from her Chanel ads here already, but I cropped and airbrushed the product out because I found it irrelevant.

P.S. The ad above is misleading. "For women like Catherine Deneuve?" There are no women like her!

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