Popularized by Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, the image of the sexually precocious young woman has been a source of constant fascination. From the age of seven, when she sang as a young prodigy on French TV, Vanessa Paradis has played on her ability to project a provocative sensuality. Her doll-like features and sex-kitten pout turned her into a major celebrity at the age of 14, when her song “Joe le Taxi” soared to the top of the French pop charts. But at the 1988 French music awards in Cannes, Paradis was taunted by boos and whistles when she performed her hit song on stage. A proud and determined individual, Paradis finished the number despite the derision. “I was a nervous wreck after that,” she recalls. “I didn’t want to see anyone and I couldn’t bear going out in public. It was the worst period of my life.” Paradis comes equipped with a boxer’s spirit: knocked down, she gets right back up and starts swinging. In 1989, Paradis appeared nude in her first feature film, Jean-Claude Brisseau’s Noce Blanche, for which she earned the coveted Cesar as best new actress. She then went on to record an acclaimed album with the legendary Serge Gainsbourg, who helped legitimize her artistic credentials while giving her added confidence as a singer. “Serge taught me the beauty of feeling the lyrics and understanding the process of creating drama out of a song,” says Paradis of her mentor, who died in 1991. “When you being as early as I did, singing become second nature. But with Serge I could appreciate how a singer has to create an identity and a connection with an audience. When we first met, he was simply going to write the lyrics for one song, but that soon evolved into an entire album. He helped give me a lot of confidence in my own talent, which I’ve never been very sure of.” There’s very little that escapes the attention of Paradis. She reads extensively, owns a large collection of films on video, and is fond of jetting back and forth between Europe and North America, maintaining homes in New York and Paris. But for all her wordly ambition, Paradis’s coquettish appearance has the unfortunate affect of scaring off potential boyfriends. “Men are afraid of me,” complains Paradis. “They don’t flirt with me, they don’t try to seduce me—it’s a bit exasperating. I don’t know why, but my friends say that there’s an intimidating side to me that scares people. I certainly don’t feel intimidating!” But speaking to Paradis, her fluid intelligence and decastatingly charming manner can prove unsettling. You find it difficult to resist falling in love with her porcelain features and shy smiles. In conversation, Paradis is earnest and candid, intent on dispelling the mystique that surrounds her public image. “There’s a love-hat relationship between the French public and me,” she admits. “It started with ‘Joe le Taxi,’ where a lot of people felt that I didn’t deserve all my success, that my singing wasn’t good, my voice too high and thin. There’s a certain justification to that, but everything I’ve done since has shown that I’ve worked hard at becoming a much better performer.” Her early career start meant experiencing adult pressures while still a child. “I don’t think I’ve lived a very normal life,” says Paradis. “I never had the feeling that I was a teenager. I think I passed directly from childhood to a form of adulthood. I grew up too fast maybe, and took life too seriously. Late I’ve had to teach myself how to have more fun again.” Paradis has always been wiling to expose the daring side of her personality. In 1991, she was paid over $1 million to appear in a controversial ad campaign for Chanel perfume in which she swung back and forth on a trapeze from inside a giant birdcage. “It was a beautiful concept,” says Paradis. “Of course, I know there was a hidden sexual metaphor to the ad, but most advertising is designed to shock and provoke. I’m obviously aware of the effect I’m supposed to have on men, and even though I don’t really understand it, I like the idea of playing with it.” Her willingness to extend the limits of her own sexuality bore fruit in the controversial 1992 music video “Tandem,” which displayed her lithe, scantily-clad frame to full advantage, writhing to the beat of primal screams while two naked black women slithered along a stainless steel pole (Maria’s note: WRONG). The graphic video, directed by the acclaimed Jean-Baptiste Mondino, created a scandal across Europe and changed Paradis’s image from that of a demure Lolita to femme fatale. “Tandem” was banned from Spanish and Italian TV, as it was in America, which naturally made it more popular than ever in the rest of the world. More importantly, “Tandem” catapulted Paradis to the forefront of the French musical scene. It demonstrated that she had a screen presence which could turn predatory at the moment’s notice. Suddenly, even her harshest critics had to admit that Paradis was very in, and very hot. “’Tandem’ opened a lot of doors for me. I wasn’t limited any more to preconceptions of what kind of singer or performer I was. And when I met Lenny Kravitz, he influenced my appreciation of music because he’s so knowledgeable about different kinds of rock music from different periods. That’s the power of music—you can create so many different kinds of emotions and moods with it. As a singer, it’s easy to reinvent yourself each time you make an album. I get bored very easily, so I loved the idea of doing something more erotic and more daring.” In 1992, Paradis had gone to New York to record a new album under the tutelage of Kravitz. She’d been a big fan of his music, and Kravitz knew her from the “Tandem” video-clip. It was this collaboration (there was also an intense love affair and talk of an engagement), that convinced her she had the talent and the presence to go on tour, something she had always avoided. “I had always been terrified of performing in front of audiences, and that’s partly the reason I did it,” says Paradis of her series of 1993 concert appearances across France and Quebec. “Lenny showed me I had enough range as a singer to pull it off without making a fool of myself. It was an important test for me and the audience response was incredibly positive. The element of fear is gone now—even the critics wrote nice things about me!” Last year, Paradis took another decisive career step. Elisa is a film about a reckless teenage girl, Marie, with a penchant for petty crime who is determined to avenge the suicide of her mother, Elisa, by finding and ultimately murdering her delinquent father. Paradis earned rave reviews from critics who were astonished by the depth and power of her performance. Co-starring Gerard Depardieu, Paradis has several nude scenes with the rugged French actor which created plenty of publicity. “Gerard said he never saw me naked because he wouldn’t look at me below eye level,” she laughs. “I didn’t care, because when I take off my clothes in front of the camera I develop a second skin. Nudity doesn’t bother me, as long as it’s justified in the story.” Ever since Noce Blanche, Paradis had been extremely reluctant to make another movie. She had turned down dozens of projects, “mostly because they were just an excuse to exploit the fact that I would be shown naked on screen,” explains Paradis. “I was going to shoot a movie with Jacques Doillon (a noted French auteur director) but then Gainsbourg came along and I wasn’t to work with Serge more than anything else.” Elisa, directed by Jean Becker, whose previous film, L’Ete Meurtrier (One Deadly Summer) from 1983 had thrust Isabelle Adjani into the spotlight, was an intense experience for Paradis, who saw many similarities between her own personality and that of Marie, her character. “I was afraid of Marie, and that’s what drew me to her. There were many difficult and complex sides to her, and there was a hysteria and tension to her that I could identify with, although not to the same level, which was why I felt that I might not be able to pull off the performance. It was a big risk for me, but I’d been attacked so much in the past by the press that I wasn’t worried what would happen if I failed. I keep a lot of things hidden inside myself, and the film was a sort of catharsis. I just vented all my own frustrations and anxieties into Marie and that kind of experience is very important to understanding who you are.” Paradis shares some of the disaffection that many in her generation feel for the way society is being run, and the vague ennui that comes from having few heroes and few causes to believe in. “I had a happy childhood, and I’ve had a very fulfilling career, but I can identify at a certain level with all the frustrations of growing up and becoming an adult. But you have two choices in life: either you can shoot yourself out of sheer despair or you can retain a hopeful outlook. I’ve chosen the latter. But success doesn’t make you happy; that’s an illusion the public has about celebrities. Being famous doesn’t help you at 11 in the morning when you’re sitting by yourself in a café. You feel lonely and worried, and there are people staring at you from the other corner. Those are the moments that cause me anguish, but I’ve learned to overcome them.” The title of the film Elisa is drawn from the Gainsbourg song of the same name. Paradis was very much the choice. “It’s difficult to find the means or the time to tell people you love them. And then you find out its’ too late and we feel sorry we never said so, “she explains.” “Serge died before I was able to say thing like that to him, and when I read the script I was moved by the fact that the film was a way of paying homage to him and was in fact dedicated to his memory. Everybody thinks that Gainsbourg, because of his image, was a miserable drunk. But he was the total opposite—he was a warm and kind and very generous man on the inside. He was very fragile and that was why he often used a shocking manner in public to hide his vulnerability.” Paradis is anxious to begin work on several film projects. “I want to do another film or two before I record another album. Music is very important to me, but I proved to myself in Elisa that I could drag the kind of difficult emotions out of myself that you need if you’re going to be a good actor. Now all I have to do is find the right man who won’t be afraid of me, raise five children, and I’ll live happily ever after. That really shows you I have impossible dreams!” Paradis laughs hysterically as she says this, grabs the microphone, and whispers, “Are you man enough for me?” Well, Vanessa…