Are Brad Pitt and Penélope Cruz trying to seduce the waitress?
Peter Howell
Movie Critic
Brad Pitt and Penélope Cruz star as an enigmatic couple in a sexy new ad for Chanel handbags. It's fashioned as a tribute to “A Man and a Woman,” Claude Lelouch’s classic Nouvelle Vague love story.
Directed by Inez & Vinoodh, the ad teases romance between the actors’ unnamed characters. The couple are enjoying some time together in the French seaside resort town of Deauville and evidently still at the flirting stage. The waitress in an elegant hotel café senses this and perhaps wants to nudge the affair forward — or maybe to become part of it?
Cruz’s character may be suggesting as much with her enigmatic response to Pitt, after he observes the waitress seems impatient or annoyed with them.
“She’s definitely not happy,” Pitt says.
“Do you want us to make her happy?” Cruz replies, with a mischievous smile. She then asks the waitress, who is played by top Vogue model Rianne Van Rompaey, if there are any rooms available at the hotel.
My read of the situation is that the waitress wants the couple to take the next step in their courtship. She’s tacitly urging them on, as Cruz senses. When Cruz says “her” she really means “us,” inviting the impending initimacy. She’s not thinking of a ménage à trois, no matter how continental that may seem.
Pitt loves making enigmatic ads with romantic overtones. He was similarly flirtatious in an ad for De’Longhi coffee machines last year.
In “A Man and a Woman,” Lelouch’s 1966 film, Anouk Aimée and Jean-Louis Trintignant play widowed parents who find themselves drawn to each other after meeting at their children’s boarding school. In that version, it’s Trintignant’s character who inquires about the room.
