Chanel Misia

Misia is the outlier in Les Exclusifs. Composed by Olivier Polge and named for Misia Sert — the pianist and salon host Renoir painted, Mallarmé wrote for, Diaghilev consulted, and Gabrielle Chanel counted as her closest friend — it takes its imagery not from a garden but from an opera dressing room: bouquets past their best, spilled powder boxes, lipstick.

That is a difficult brief for film. There is no product demonstration in fragrance, and the usual fallback — a face, a city, a slow-motion dress — says nothing about the scent itself.

So the piece works from the composition instead. Rose, violet and iris are rendered as material behaviour rather than as flowers: pigment suspended in air, powder settling on lacquer, benzoin and tonka warming the palette from underneath.

The pacing borrows from the dressing room rather than the stage — the interval before a performance, when everything is in place and nothing has started yet.