In Fieri The Jetty
This is the story of a man marked by an image from his childhood. The violent scene, whose meaning he would not grasp until much later, took place on the great jetty at Orly, a few years before the start of the Third World War. On Sundays, parents bring their children to watch the planes… Of this Sunday, the child of this story would remember the frozen sun, the scene at the end of the jetty. Moments to remember are just like other moments. They are only made memorable by the scars they leave. The face he had seen was to be the only peacetime image to survive the war. Had he really seen it? Or had he invented the tender gesture to shield him from the madness to come? The sudden noise, the woman’s gesture, the crumpling body, the cries of the crowd. Later, he knew he had seen a man die.”
These words introduce Chris Marker’s extraordinary dystopian vision of post-apocalyptic Paris, La Jetee, a film made entirely of black-and-white photographs.
La Jetee, 1962
The boy of the narration is a memory; he is now a nameless man kept prisoner in the underground passageways of the Palais de Chaillot. Now, after the Third World War, the man is held together by a vague memory of a woman’s face, glimpsed on the jetty of Orly airport that day. That recollection is the film’s single point of tenderness and the driver of the story. Le Jetee’s opening, and its reference to the unreliability but piercing emotionality of memory is the inspiration for In Fieri The Jetty, a graceful, woody aquatic from creative director Maria Teresa Venezia and perfumer Enrico Buccella (who, by the way, created the brilliant but inexplicably overlooked Eau Saharienne from Les Voiles Depliees). With its spare construction, wintry notes and smudgy edges, The Jetty offers an olfactory snapshot of a frozen moment, that hazy picture the mind looks to when it seeks comfort.
Venezia describes The Jetty as fragrance that draws on her favourite scents from the Ionian Sea along with the “idea of bringing back memories, simple memories, which were forgotten and cloudy but eventually become clear and everything else freezes.” The Jetty opens with a strong spray of mint and seawater, which give the fragrance an immediate wash of chill. Cedar drifts up right behind it, like an old rowboat bumping lazily against the dock on a frigid day. The Jetty stays fixed here for some time, mirroring the stop-photo stillness of the film’s mise en scene. Gradually, anise begins to sidle alongside the cedar, lending its rooty shadow to the composition. But then, unexpectedly, I find an indefinite greenness which I take to be cyclamen. This slightly grassy, fresh speckle in the perfume’s mid-section gives the perfume immediacy and movement, and The Jetty starts, ever so slightly, to relax. Tonka bean continues the warming trend, its raisiny quality present here rather than the bean’s vanillic coziness. Fittingly, there is no sweetness in its presence, but the tonka’s comforting warmth acts as an aromatic marker of man’s memory of that feminine face on the platform, clutched all these years like a scrap of paper scribbled with a loved-one’s name, and now indistinct to time.
From Chris Marker’s archives of La Jetee, 1962
The Jetty’s opening frigidity and ocean spindrift continue to hover over the cedar, which becomes the fragrance’s central note by dry-down. Stepping back and smelling The Jetty again, I find it has taken on the faded, woody-vanillic smell of old paper and old boat wood spattered with cold ocean water. I half expect to hear the unrelenting rhythm of distant waves crashing against the pier while, at the window of Orly airport, a little boy presses against the glass and waits for planes to take off, not yet noticing the warm smile about to turn his way.
Notes: cyclamen, cinnamon, anise, mint, cedar, aquatic notes, tonka bean.
Disclaimer: Sample of The Jetty kindly sent to me by In Fieri. My opinions, as always, are my own.
Lauryn Beer, Senior Editor
In Fieri The Jetty
Thanks to the generosity of In Fieri, we have a bottle of The Jetty for one registered reader in the U.S. To be eligible, please comment on what strikes you about In Fieri The Jetty. Draw closes 11/24/2022.
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Maria Teresa Venezia is the 165th in our American Perfumer Series you can read about her path to perfumery here.
Read Rachel Watson’s review of Park of the Monsters, a finalist for the 2022 Art and Olfaction Awards, and Ida Meister’s review of Orris Vetyver.
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