Coco Avant Chanel Poster Banned In Paris

France has a law against depicting smoking in advertising — so to avoid prosecution, the company that sells ads on Parisian public transportation banned a poster featuring Audrey Tautou as Coco Chanel holding a cigarette.

Never mind that Chanel herself smoked up to 50 clopes a day. The company, Metrobus, demanded that the poster above be replaced with this more anodyne shot of Tautou and the male lead, Alessandro Nivola.

Metrobus also airbrushed a film still of legendary French comedian Jacques Tati in Mon Oncle, which originally featured Tati smoking a pipe while riding a bicycle. (The still serves as a poster for a Tati retrospective, currently open, at the Cinémathèque Française.) In the new version of the poster, Tati holds a yellow windmill between his lips.

France’s current health minister thinks the poster bans and airbrushings are absurd. So too does Claude Evin, the former health minister responsible for the anti-tobacco advertising law in the first place.

Either way, it makes for some pretty fantastic publicity for Coco Avant Chanel, which opens abroad today.