Pop star Lady Gaga plants lipstick smile on Mona Lisa in Louvre clip

PARIS – Pop star Lady Gaga comes face to face with the Mona Lisa in the Louvre and plants a lipstick smile on her face in a new video clip released on Sept 25 by the singer and the French museum.

The 38-year-old American diva, who stars in musical psychological thriller Joker: Folie A Deux, did a little bit of lipstick “vandalism” to Leonardo da Vinci’s masterpiece to promote the Louvre’s new exhibition, Figures Of The Fool. Like the movie, it opens in October.

The film is a sequel to the 2019 movie Joker, starring Joaquin Phoenix as the titular character. Phoenix reprises his role in the sequel while Lady Gaga plays Harley Quinn, the Joker’s love interest.

The pop star creeps through the Paris museum at night in a red wig singing a song composed specially for the video, which was released on both her and the museum’s Instagram and TikTok accounts.

She ends up nose-to-nose with the Mona Lisa before painting a clownish smile in lipstick on the protective glass in front of it. As she stands back, a black mascara tear drops from the star’s eye.

The Louvre’s official Instagram account also tweaked its profile picture to depict Mona Lisa with a clownish smile drawn on in red lipstick.

Asked about the wisdom of encouraging such gestures at a time when paintings are regularly being attacked in museums by climate activists, the Louvre insisted the video was “purely fictional”, and was a homage to da Vinci, who was obsessed with the smile.

The museum insisted that an additional screen had been put up for the video in front of the 3.8cm-thick bulletproof one that protects the canvas.

The lipstick smile is an echo of a key scene in Joker: Folie A Deux, when Harley Quinn visits The Joker, her criminal soulmate, in jail.

The Louvre said it worked with Warner Bros Pictures, the Hollywood studio that made the movie, which shot the video in the museum.

This is not the first time the Louvre has been a playground of the stars.

Rapper and producer Will.i.am famously put himself into some of the museum’s best known paintings for his 2016 animated video for Mona Lisa Smile, including taking the reins of Napoleon’s white charger.

In 2018, Beyonce and Jay-Z filmed their clip Apesh**, using Gericault’s iconic The Raft Of The Medusa, the Mona Lisa and the coronation of Napoleon to make some pithy points about black people’s place, and the lack of it, in classical art history.

More recently, the Louvre, the world’s most visited museum, created a buzz with its images of a private visit given to singer Celine Dion before she sang at the opening ceremony of the Paris Olympics in July.

Lady Gaga also surprised fans with news of a 13-track companion album titled Harlequin for the Joker sequel, which she announced just days before its slated Sept 27 release.

On the red carpet for the film’s London premiere on Sept 25, Lady Gaga said of the album to Reuters: “It’s all these really interesting original productions.

“It has so much of the music that’s in Joker as well as some original pieces that I wrote for the film and one that’s for the album only, which is called Happy Mistake.”

The experience of playing Harley Quinn has been an inspiration for the star.

“It was so amazing to get to know this character through music, through this script, through dance, through all this tremendous collaboration,” she said, adding it had been hard to let go of Harley Quinn at the end of filming.

“You know, I don’t really know if I did because I made a whole record about her.”

The musician has simultaneously been working on her upcoming studio album, dubbed LG7.

“My studio album is coming out in February and my first single is coming out really soon, so I’m excited about that too,” she said. AFP, REUTERS