Blue Velvet director David Lynch has lent his surrealist edge and unsettling color sense to the elegant house of Dior with Lady Blue Shanghai, a 16-minute video starring French actress Marion Cotillard. The plot: Cotillard enters an empty Shanghai hotel to find a blue handbag — a Lady Dior, to be precise — shrouded in smoke and lights, provoking a dreamlike flashback to an encounter with a Chinese ex-lover who had handed her a blue rose outside of the Pearl Tower, a TV tower in Shanghai.

Lady Blue Shanghai is the third of Dior’s “Lady Dior” film noir-style advertisements, following Lady Noire, directed by Olivier Dahane (who worked with Cotillard on La Vie En Rose), and Lady Rouge, directed by Jonas Akerlund, who has most recently directed Lady Gagas "Paparazzi" and "Telephone" music videos.

As a filmmaker whose work thrives on fantasy and eccentrically draws influences from different decades, Lynch is something of a kindred spirit to the fashion industry. In the past, he has collaborated on perfume ads for Calvin Klein, Yves Saint Laurent, and Gucci, and a fetish shoe exhibition with Christian Louboutin. For this latest project, Lynch apparently had only the scantest of direction. He told the FinancialTimes:"[Dior] called me up and said, ‘Would you like to make a short film for the internet? You can do anything you want, you just need to show the handbag, the Pearl Tower and some old Shanghai.'" What, no dwarfs?  

Click here to watch the film