Advertising: Sex, scent, Sicily - and Christmas

What's it like in Sicily? Sex, death and kidnapping are key industries. They've got beautiful, smouldering young widows. And The Leopard, wasn't that Sicily? In fact, wasn't Sicily heavily featured in the statutory teenage dose of great Italian Art Films. (It was the Everyman Hampstead for me.) Those black-and-white films in which men wore flat caps and had two-day growth. (And is that why fashionista men started doing it in the late Seventies?)

All this and more is provoked by a new Christmas scent commercial. It's a high-concept thing, whose main themes are sex, death and underwear sniffing, all rendered in the 1910 look of a 1960-something art film, and set in Sicily.

Through an open doorway we see a young widow being dressed for her husband's funeral. She absolutely has to change into a black bra and pants, taking off her white slip, dabbing her moist eyes with it. Watching her is agonised young Mr Flat Cap Two-Day Growth, who looks like a Milan model pulling faces. He's in there like a shot, picking up the discarded linen.

Out at the funeral parade, the whole thing proves too much for the extravagantly gorgeous widow and she faints - doesn't this all sound like opera notes? Mr Sensitive scoops her up and lays her down carefully. She revives, their eyes meet - marvellous eye make-up, of course - but the slip falls from the back pocket of his picturesque prole funeral suit. An identical young man grabs it and buries his face in it. This woman's got all the boys in town on her case. Then No 1 snatches it back. Then there's the pack shot, Dolce & Gabbana Sicily.

The whole thing was probably conceived and shot by a fashion photographer who'd seen a lot of art films for the costumes and set dressing.

This kind of scent commercial exists outside the ordinary process of advertising - humour, special effects, product claims - utterly outside the British tradition and only at Christmas. Dolce & Gabbana is a semi-humorous brand invented by two gentlemen sharing, in Milan, I think. It's popular with footballers and extensively patronised by Mrs Beckham. It's not really a high-drama and gravy-dark voiceover brand any more than Guy Ritchie is from Hampstead.

Peter@sru.co.uk