Bitter, Bitte: Bandit

Germaine Cellier (1909–1976), unarguably the bitch goddess of modern perfumery, was beautiful, smart, indomitable and unapologetically direct in her approach to the olfactive experience. She sired (yes, sired) a quartet of masterpieces (Vent Vert, Fracas, Bandit and Jolie Madame) and a host of other perfumes which, while carrying the names of her collaborators, bore her smudge and smell. According to critic Chandler Burr, Cellier’s final result often flaunts the impassioned, unabashed features of, say, a de Kooning’s Woman. According to Victoria Frolova of Bois de Jasmin, she was “a creator ahead of her time, relying on short formulas to paint dazzling abstractions.” To me, a Cellier creation can range in resemblance from an early Schönberg like Verklarte Nacht to a late concerto by Lutoslawski, from moon-kissed verdure to picaresque in retrograde.

If Chanel No. 5 is Jazz Age modern, all star-upon-the-forehead coyness, Bandit is Modern Art, High Art, Difficult Art – the olfactive equivalent of Ayn Rand or Nathalie Sarraute. It does not show or flaunt; instead, it taunts and tempts and plays its quarry until coming within an inch of an edge, but an edge which only resembles an edge. In a strange reversal of roles – it was created in 1944 – it is, for me, a very Fascist perfume. (But, there again, we say such paradoxes live on. Wasn’t post-war Germany the best market for Dior’s New Look?)

Bandit is a perfume ripe for psychoanalysis or, better yet, shock therapy. It retires, like a rich person retiring to a “health farm” or like a Lowell retiring to MacDowell Colony, to write a book or carry on a type of tender, tortured affair with a younger woman deemed too beautiful for books and barbiturates. It understands that feelings, even potentially destructive ones, are to be heeded and that the drink you take before you fall may be the very best one of all.

I, for one, love its glove-compartment aura. Cracked leather gloves, a set of keys, a crumpled pack of Lucky Strikes. It makes me think of a housewife turned into an accomplice, like Joan Bennett opposite James Mason in The Reckless Moment or Janet Leigh tormented by reefer-crazed dykes in Touch of Evil.

It’s a famously short formula with about 1% of isobutyl quinoline (or IBQ, as my friends call it) amped up with the very same galbanum that, three years later, Cellier would transform into her pastoral masterpiece Vent Vert. The middle notes are, at turns, indolic and spicy (jasmine, carnation absolute) and single-handedly responsible for the concept of some great later masculines like Dior Jules and Patou pour Homme. At this writing, it is still among the most astonishing, disturbing perfumes on the market and to miss it would be like going to Vegas to study the postmodern “architecture of spectacle” and missing the pirates at Treasure Island.

Image credit: 35mm color still from The Image (1975) by Radley Metzger