No Smoking

I’m riding the bus in Paris, capital of one of the world’s most artistic and cinema-oriented societies.   Not surprisingly there are advertising posters above the windows. One publicizes a just-released movie about famed French fashion designer Coco Chanel. Another signals a new exhibition devoted to the career of revered but long-deceased French movie comedian Jacques Tati.   But wait. Something’s wrong.   Something’s missing.   Tati’s trademark image always showed him smoking a pipe. Not here. Not for this exhibition.   On the bus the publicity posters show him with something in his mouth that looks more or less like a pipe but has a small twirling yellow fan in place of the pipe bowl.   To French Tati lovers—and there are millions–that seems totally incomprehensible, like Groucho Marx without his cigar or Humphrey Bogart without his cigarette.   Undeterred, by way of explanation, the Paris bus and metro system claimed it simply was following to the letter the 1991 French law Evin which bans publicity that encourages smoking.   Then in a quick sequel to the Tati nonsense, it followed up by withdrawing its original advertisements for a new movie about famed French dress designer Coco Chanel. In real life, Chanel practically never appeared without a cigarette in her mouth or her hand and so she did in the 2,000 movie posters originally put up.   In the two slightly but only slightly different publicity replacements Chanel now is enlaced in the arms of two of her better known male admirers and is obviously too preoccupied to be smoking.   That may not be morally as proper but it’s apparently medically more acceptable to the Evin law watchdogs.   What’s even crazier about all this is that Claude Evin, a former French health minister and the very author of the law prohibiting tobacco and smoking advertising, quickly came out to denounce the extremes to which blind adherence to his law has led.   While the legislation he authored was designed to put a stop to “direct and indirect” propaganda for tobacco products, he said, the publicity posters concerned were not connected in any way to the tobacco industry and were simply a reflection of France’s “cultural heritage.”   To pull them off the French capitals bus and metro lines, he said, was simply “ridiculous.”   So it may seem, but the Paris Metro and Bus system isn’t taking any legal chances and is sticking by its decision.   On the other hand, if you want to see Tati with his pipe you still can do it in Paris until August 2, in the exposition “Jacques Tati, Two Times, Three Movements” in the French Cinémathèque, 5 rue de Bercy, in the capital’s 12th arrondisement.   Or, for Chanel with her cigarette, you can go see the movie “Coco Before Chanel,” with prize-winning actress Audrey Tautou in the starring role, at almost any movie theatre in France.   All that’s considered artistic or cinematographic heritage, not publicity.   So there, you Evin law partisans!