The song marked her only collaboration with American movie screenwriter and director Abel Ferrara, who directed the very expensive music video in which Farmer appears both as a bourgeois woman and a prostitute.

[5] The song begins with different sounds evoking the street: a door that slams, an English voice in a loudspeaker, a siren of a police car.

The lyrics display a highly elegant vocabulary, with an alternance of lines and puns in French and English.

She told him she wanted to play the role of a prostitute in the video, and eventually, she wrote the screenplay in collaboration with him.

[10] The man who plays Farmer's lover is the American actor Giancarlo Esposito, and real prostitutes who appear in the video.

From her car, the rich woman looks at the prostitutes on the sidewalk and then sees her double threatened with a knife by her pimp who eventually murders her.

[16][17][18][19][20] The first images of the video were published by French magazine Voici, which had managed to illegally acquire some shots during the production.

[2] In an interview on Paris Première in 1996, Farmer explained that the video (which would be analyzed on Arte in July 2002[citation needed]), does not reflect her perception of California, adding: "It is a little caricature I would say.

[12] Florence Rajon criticized the video, saying that the collaboration between the two artists (Ferrara and Farmer) was "more disappointing than seducing" and that "we can not really consider "California" as a masterpiece": the subject was "too exploitative" and "images of beautiful postcards of Hollywood are a bit too telephoned".

[24] By contrast, Royer deemed the video a "total success, in which are merging the dreamlike imaginary of Mylène and the brutal realism of Ferrara".

[10] "California" was performed in lip-sync by Farmer in a single television show: Les Années tubes, broadcast on TF1 on 18 May 1996.

Images of Los Angeles by night were shown on giant screens on stage, and Farmer, entirely dressed in gold, performed first alone, then with two female dancers,[27] in a very suggestive choreography.

Do not cross", Farmer slowly descended the stairs of the stage and performed a dance with her hands during the musical bridge.

Farmer wore a glittering short dress and red cape with hood, performing a choreography similar to that of the 1996 tour.

[34] In 2004, Cedric, an unknown singer who participated in a programme on the radio station NRJ, covered the song in a R&B version.