COCO BEFORE CHANEL Anne Fontaine’s Coco Before Chanel gives us belle époque Coco, opening in 1893 with a grim scene of the 10-year-old waif and her sister unceremoniously dumped at an orphanage, and ending around World War I, a few years before the Chanel empire is launched. The Coco of Fontaine’s project, adequately performed by Audrey Tautou, dramatizes Chanel’s most fundamental contradiction: The proud, mythomaniac peasant who would liberate women from suffocating corsets, pounds of extra material and hats that looked liked “meringues” was able to do so by lying in the beds of rich men, namely millionaire racehorse owner Etienne Balsan (Benoît Poelvoorde) and English industrialist Arthur “Boy” Capel (Alessandro Nivola). “Coco Chanel never married,” reads the first of the closing intertitles, which the film seems to honor as the designer’s most significant accomplishment. Aiming to be a tale of self-creation, Fontaine’s film more often plays as a dull romance, Chanel’s role as mistress somehow worthy of noble celebration. Coco Before Chanel concludes with an anachronistic coda: An older Coco sits on the famous steps of her couture house as contemporary models march past her, wearing Chanel’s Greatest Hits Through the Decades. The valedictory moment feels completely unearned in a film so strenuously devoted to the years before its subject’s fame. (Royal; Arclight Hollywood) (Melissa Anderson)
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''In order to be irreplaceable,'' said the legendary French couturier Gabrielle ''Coco'' Chanel, ''one must always be different.'' The very feminine, very inward-looking French biopic Coco Before Chanel examines the influences that made Chanel so different — and so irreplaceable — the way an observant fashion student might deconstruct an haute couture garment to understand how it's built. The woman who became Chanel grew up a poor, skinny orphan in a convent school, where she learned sewing as a trade. She idled in her early years as a cabaret singer, lived with one protective rich man while falling in love with another, and hewed to a life of unmarried independence that hid a tough, sad heart.
Coco Before Chanel is dreamiest when director Anne Fontaine — working through muse Audrey Tautou — views the world through young Coco's eyes, literally. We see the girl look at nuns' habits and, later, admire her lovers' masculine wardrobe; the next thing you know, she's cutting up men's shirts and freeing generations of women from the tyranny of corsets and flounce. Tautou is a fascinating, unsmiling, petite presence with a severe brow and an androgynous appeal, so much so that I wish Alessandro Nivola (Junebug) were a more robust beau as Arthur ''Boy'' Capel, the love of Chanel's life. Still, Tautou looks great in the boy clothes — the foundation of Coco Chanel's womanly empire. B
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A negative review from Anthony Lane in THE NEW YORKER...
As the title implies, “Coco Before Chanel” is one of those films, like “Young Mr. Lincoln” or “Young Winston,” which invite us to peek into the origins of the notable. These acts of preëmption are lured, by their nature, toward the “Aha!” moment—the point at which a future that we already know is neatly foretold in the present. Hence the closing scene of Barry Levinson’s “Young Sherlock Holmes,” in which the junior sleuth, viewed in profile, puts a pipe in his mouth and a deerstalker on his head for the first time, and begins to become himself. Hence, too, the maritime sequence in Anne Fontaine’s new film, when Gabrielle Chanel (Audrey Tautou) gazes intently at fishermen, clad in dark tops, as they haul their nets onto the beach. Those jerseys! The way they hang! So simple! Aha!
The truth is that the mechanics of inspiration, however well verified, threaten to look gauche in the hands of the dramatizer; even “Shakespeare in Love” flowed more freely in the business of stagecraft than it did in the shots of a quill-clutching, beard-stroking Bard. The more tacit the hint, the less we are likely to smirk, and, to be fair, Fontaine—who co-wrote the screenplay with her sister Camille—proceeds wherever possible by the insertion of small clues. For every clunker (“What is this material?” Chanel asks, before taking a pair of scissors to a man’s sweater and slicing it into a cardigan), there is a smattering of grace notes, as our heroine’s environment leaves her with an echo of suggestion. Thus, at the start, in 1893, she is stranded by her father at an orphanage: a joyless experience, she claims, but something about it—the starched white glare of the nuns’ cuffs and wimples, glimpsed in closeup—would seem to have lingered in her mind’s eye.
From here, we hop fifteen years, to a provincial tavern, where Gabrielle, now a tetchy and man-resistant minx, sings for her supper; one of the numbers, with its refrain of “Coco at the Trocadero,” becomes her trademark and bequeaths her a permanent name. She lives with Adrienne (Marie Gillain), who, while close in age, is actually her aunt. I spent the entire film under the impression that she was her sister, and, to complicate matters, Coco claims that “the aunts who raised me beat me and starved me,” though that is a bid for sympathy, not a fact; there were no such Dickensian hags. On becoming a public figure, Chanel grew so richly inventive about her past, powdering over any discrepancies and shames, that all the film can do is pick and choose, and hope that some of its testimony escapes the fog of myth.
What is certain is that Coco went to reside with Étienne Balsan (Benoît Poelvoorde). He is the best thing in the film, and an accurate, oddly touching demonstration of a type: the pleasure-hunting wastrel, who surprises us, and himself, with the emergence of unfashionable feelings. Coco, having met him in the tavern, rolls up to his country estate, where he breeds Thoroughbreds and misspends the family wealth. (“Rest assured, I haven’t read any of them,” he says, waving a hand at the yards of leather-bound books.) When I first saw Poelvoorde, sixteen years ago, in “Man Bites Dog,” he was whippy and as mean as sin. He has since filled out, the edges have softened, and you can see why Coco might be drawn to such rubicund sloth. Not for a second does she love him, but he is much taken by his new acquisition—more of a curiosity than a mistress—who lounges abed with her hair down, smoking and reading a novel in the mornings. Late in the day, she wins his philistine heart. More important, she borrows his tweed waistcoat, and crops his black ties to make herself a bow. Until this film, I hadn’t realized how much Chanel stole from men’s clothes (“I’m not used to undressing a boy,” one lover admits), not least from the dashing cut of le style anglais.
As if to stress the point, she bags herself a real Brit: one of Balsan’s chums, by the name of Boy Capel (Alessandro Nivola). Later, during the First World War, he acted as a go-between for Lloyd George and Clemenceau, but to Fontaine he is simply a charm-powered cad, who mildly asks of Balsan, “Mind if I borrow her for a few days?,” as if Mlle. Chanel were a sports car, or a filly. Nivola coats the fellow with an unmistakable sheen of self-love; Coco may be mad about her Boy, but he seems madder still, though he does lend her the funds to set up a milliner’s shop. To those unversed in Chanel, the hats may be news: as befits a woman who was led by her brain, rather than by any lower organ, she began by dressing the head, then worked her way down. Emilienne d’Alençon (Emmanuelle Devos), an actress and full-time voluptuary, tries on one of Coco’s plain, unfeathered creations and declares, “I feel totally naked,” even though her skirt reaches halfway down her shins.
The problem for Audrey Tautou is that she is doomed to trail clouds of “Amélie” wherever she goes. Those inky round eyes and that pixie mug insure that hers are the features, poor thing, that social anthropologists will eternally reach for when asked to illustrate the term gamine. Or mignonne. She does her best to capture the sullen grit of the young Coco, and the sour distaste she felt for those off whom she sponged; but it’s hard to jut your jaw when you don’t have much of a jaw, just a perfectly rounded chin, and the adamantine hardness of Chanel—not just in her bone structure and bearing but in the elimination of all fuss from her couture and all wasteful palaver from her soul—is probably beyond an actress as winsome as Tautou. The ideal would have been Kristin Scott Thomas, twenty years ago. Maybe she could take over, should Fontaine decide to tell the rest of the tale.
As with Tautou, so with the movie. For one thing, the score is far too gentle and antique; Chanel confessed to an affair with Stravinsky, for heaven’s sake, and you could argue that her contribution to modernism was as fruitful and far-reaching as that of any other woman, including Gertrude Stein. On the credit side, there are crisp encounters of texture that you long to reach out and caress: Coco sporting a black sequinned jacket during a snowfall, one glitter competing with another, or viewed from behind, trim and tightly buttoned, facing a beach where everyone else is in fluttering silks—she could almost be Chaplin, dropped into a photograph by Lartigue. But too much of the film feels like one of Balsan’s house parties: undriven, indulgent, quite at ease. (Nobody seems willing or able to leave them, and even Coco herself tends to wander away and then drift grumpily back; the midsection of the film is a dozier version of Buñuel’s “The Exterminating Angel,” though Fontaine doesn’t grasp, as Buñuel does, how creepy and infernal that sense of immobility must be.) I missed the desperation that goaded the real Coco—not just the sulks that pass like rain showers across Tautou’s prettiness but that brisk contempt for existing conditions which led Chanel, like any French revolutionary, to overturn them. Every now and then, it shows through. “Why did you cut your hair?” someone asks near the end. “Because it got in the way,” she replies. A hundred and twenty years earlier, she would have done the same thing with heads.
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Posts: 27338 | Location: Phoenix, AZ | Registered: February 02, 2003
A short, positive review from David Edelstein in NEW YORK MAGAZINE...
As picturesque period biopics with too many symmetrical compositions go, Anne Fontaine’s Coco Before Chanel is surprisingly intimate and nuanced. Its focus is relatively narrow: largely on the period between the arrival of the impoverished Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel (Audrey Tautou) at the château of her patron–cum–sugar daddy Étienne Balsan and her departure for Paris to launch the business (and aesthetic) we all know and cherish. The movie’s terrific dramatic hook is that Coco lives as a kept woman while affecting a boyish demeanor and beginning to design clothes that emphasize sleek female self-possession. Tautou isn’t the most profound actress, but she endures humiliation with affecting stoicism and is mouthwateringly cute in modified men’s suits, and Benoît Poelvoorde’s Balsan grows in stature and becomes very touching in his helpless devotion to the woman he once treated as a geisha. Best of all, the movie suggests a connection between fashion and the social order that The September Issue, for all its pleasures, fails even to acknowledge.
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A positive review from Jordan Mintzer in VARIETY...
More sentimental than chic, Gallic biopic "Coco Before Chanel" nonetheless knits a convincing portrait of the designer's journey from her humble beginnings as a provincial seamstress to the halls of Parisian haute couture. Focusing on the era in which Gabrielle "Coco" Chanel (winningly played by Audrey Tautou) served as mistress of an eccentric millionaire, the film reveals, via meticulous period imagery, how the couturier forged a style that would change the way women dressed in the 20th century. Warner Bros.' April 22 Gaul release should scoot gracefully down the theatrical runway before wafting overseas like a splash of No. 5.
The first of two Chanel biopics skedded to hit screens this year, this one, co-written by helmer Anne Fontaine and her sister Camille, limits its scope to the time in the designer's late 20s when she began showcasing her distinct creative voice. The opening, purely visual flashback shows the young Chanel arriving at an ominous Catholic orphanage after her mother has died and her father has left to support the family.
The stark setting and drab religious garb -- superbly rendered by production designer Olivier Radot and costume designer Catherine Leterrier -- will have an enduring impact on her future designs, whose cornerstones will be simplicity and sophistication.
The action then jumps to a decade or so later, as busy bee Chanel (Tautou) is working days as a seamstress and nights as a cabaret entertainer ("to pay for her dresses"), alongside her sis, Adrienne (Marie Gillain). During a fun and flashy dance number, she crosses paths with debauched heir Etienne Balsan (Benoit Poelvoorde); before long, she's moved to his country estate, where she serves as his friend, mistress and inhouse style consultant.
Caught in a lavish world where women overdress themselves in bails of lace, suffocating corsets and hats oozing with flowers, Chanel begins to experiment with her lover's clothing, designing outfits that are both easier to wear and easier on the eye. These sequences are among the film's strongest, revealing the contrast between the heavy 19th-century styles worn by the epoch's wealthier class and Chanel's vision of a sleek, intelligent wardrobe to help place women on an equal footing with men.
Pic's third section brings a melodramatic twist to Chanel's sudden and impossible affair with a British industrialist (Alessandro Nivola). The drawing-room drama and ensuing love triangle feel a tad forced, but they do explain how Chanel is pushed to liberate herself from kept-woman status through her relentless work ethic and gifted eye.
For a film that is, after all, about fashion, helmer Fontaine ("How I Killed My Father" and the glossy "The Girl From Monaco") and d.p. Christophe Beaucarne ("Irina Palm") make things extremely pleasurable to look at. Between lingering wide shots and gliding p.o.v. camerawork, the crisp visuals show Chanel forever analyzing the stylistic tendencies of her surroundings.
Tautou's perf is one of her finest to date, revealing her character's headstrong personality through smart delivery and a permanent but attractive pout. As with his portrayal of a serial killer in "Man Bites Dog," Belgian thesp Poelvoorde manages to make the fairly despicable Etienne seem quite likable by the end of the movie. More than one option
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Coco Before Chanel -- Film Review By Bernard Besserglik, April 21, 2009 07:05 ET
Bottom Line: Love triangle brings shape, sense and sparkle to story of Chanel's early life.
PARIS -- Spectacle, a love triangle, heritage settings, bravura acting, witty dialogue, a bittersweet finale: There's something for everyone in Anne Fontaine's "Coco Before Chanel," and with the title providing name recognition to die for, her film appears set to storm multiplexes worldwide.
There also is -- not the least of the movie's pleasures -- the sense of a keen intelligence marshaling and shaping the material, shunning cliche and sentimentality and creating meaning out of what for once is not the standard biopic procedure of ticking off the boxes in a celebrity CV.
Fontaine's focus is on Chanel's formative years just before World War I, the transition from the modest, virtually peasant background of her childhood to the world of fashion and haute couture that she came to revolutionize. The young Gabrielle (Audrey Tautou), or Coco as she soon became known, meets and moves in with the wealthy racehorse owner Etienne Balsan (Benoit Poelvoorde), leading the life of a courtesan, resenting her dependence, keeping a tight rein on her emotions and all the time observing and learning from the elevated circles in which she finds herself.
She is befriended by another of Balsan's many mistresses, the actress Emilienne (Emmanuelle Devos), who encourages her to develop her talents and strike out on her own. She then finds love in the shape of Arthur "Boy" Capel (the U.S.-born Alessandro Nivola), an English businessman who steals her from under Balsan's nose and finally sets her up in business.
The love story is engagingly done, but Fontaine's core interest is in showing how Coco becomes Chanel, in pointing out the markers along the path that led a penniless young woman, with no resources other than her inner strength, to become a key figure in shaping contemporary tastes in style and design.
Tautou fully inhabits the role of Coco, her face a mask as if her character has yet to determine which identity she is to assume, sexually as much as socially. The flamboyant Balsan, by contrast, appears to be all of a piece -- Poelvoorde is excellent, stealing many of the scenes he appears in -- but Fontaine shows that his force-of-nature persona too is a mask, concealing deeper vulnerabilities.
"Coco" is Fontaine's first venture into costume drama, but her portrayal of a woman making her way in a perilous prefeminist world is wholly convincing. Alexandre Desplat's score is tasteful and unobtrusive and the period detail impeccable.
Opens: Wednesday, April 22 in France (Warner Bros); U.S. this fall (Sony Pictures Classics)
Posts: 27338 | Location: Phoenix, AZ | Registered: February 02, 2003
By Claudia Puig There are hints of the fashion icon and early feminist that Coco Chanel was to become in Coco Before Chanel, though the film focuses on the period in her life just before she became a famous designer.
As such, the film, directed by Anne Fontaine (The Girl From Monaco), is not an expansive biopic but a fascinating snapshot of a pivotal chapter for Chanel, her formative fashionista years.
Because it's more superficially stylish than profound, Coco leaves one wanting more — more of an in-depth examination of her complex nature, and more about the years when her simple designs captivated the fashion world.
Still, the film, while scaled-down, is quite beautifully woven, like a classic Chanel tweed.
At the heart of this handsomely mounted period drama are two stellar performances. Audrey Tautou plays Gabrielle "Coco" Chanel with flair, uncomplicated elegance and plucky confidence. Alessandro Nivola, an American actor playing a British businessman and speaking French, is a revelation. Given the ease with which he woos Coco in French, in the role of the charismatic but ill-fated Arthur "Boy" Capel, one would not guess he was a native English speaker.
He plays the role with depth, dashing charm and intelligence. Though he has skillfully played character roles in a variety of American art-house and mainstream films (Junebug, Mansfield Park), it's a pleasure to see him shine in a major part in a foreign-language film.
Coco is a respectful, measured tribute to an iconic couturier. The film spends too much time on her early dancehall days — we hear her signature "Coco" ditty more than anyone should have to. Chanel was working on her personal re-invention as she partook of the lavish comforts offered by her benefactor and sometimes lover, Etienne Balsan (Benoit Poelvoorde).
The film might have benefited from expanding its focus to include more perspective about Chanel's metamorphosis from hat-maker to storied designer. Still, the expressive Tautou is compelling. Even as an awkward, cheeky girl, Chanel had an inherent belief in herself and her ability to transcend her origins.
The archives of Maison Chanel allowed the filmmakers to peruse their collections. A concluding montage of classic Chanel fashions, presented on a bevy of models surrounding Coco as she sits casually on a stair step, is a visual delight. Coco Before Chanel is a tasteful costume drama with flashes of fascinating personal history.
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Can't post right now, but both the NY Times and LA Times reviews are near raves with very nice things to say about Tatou, so maybe her stock should be higher than I thought going into the weekend.
We don't see Coco Chanel in an actual classroom in Coco Before Chanel, the meticulous, somber new biopic of the fashion designer before she became an icon. But throughout writer-director Anne Fontaine's film, the young Coco (Audrey Tatou) is a student, quietly gathering the elements of what will be her style.
Deposited at an orphanage by her father as a child in 1893, she stares at the nuns around her, downloading the crisp whites of their wimples for future use. When she's apprenticed to a hosiery maker and trying to make money on the side singing in bars with Adrienne Chanel (Marie Gillain, playing a composite of Chanel's aunt and her sister), she rips apart a corset, giving Adrienne's lush body a chance to move within the clothing. As a young woman, vacationing with her lover at the beach, she covets the simplicity of the striped sweaters the sailors wear to mind their nets. (See pictures of Snuggie on the runway.)
The film follows the lonely young singer and seamstress into the life of a courtesan, a job she's not particularly suited to. She meets a rich gentleman farmer, Etienne Balsan (the marvelous Benoît Poelvoorde), and follows him to his château outside Paris, drawn by a lack of other alternatives and a desire to get closer to Paris. She offers herself physically but without any indication that she is interested in the act from a personal perspective. Her only attempt to ingratiate herself is in learning how to ride Etienne's beloved horses, and even then, she's got an ulterior motive: she likes the horses too. They and the indulgent lifestyle that goes with them intrigue her.
Etienne introduces her to a gang of party boys, their mistresses and some artistic types, and while Coco holds herself at a distance from most of them, she does make a few contacts that matter. The most important of these is an actress named Emilienne, a composite Fontaine created from two historical figures, played to the mischievous hilt by actress Emmanuelle Devos (Sur mes levres). It's Emilienne who encourages Coco to start making and selling her simple little hats, putting her on the road to her real career.
On the relative scale of courtesan keepers, Etienne is a kindly boss, although he never lets Coco forget her place. When he attempts to send her away, she refuses. She's tenacious but never tender. Early in the movie, she makes the pronouncement that a "woman in love is like a begging dog" and she sticks to it, until Boy Capel (Alessandro Nivola, giving off the vibe of a young Daniel Day-Lewis) comes along. He introduces her to great books and the notion that she is exceptional. "You're elegant," he says, and with him, for what seems like the first time in the film, we see Tatou's dazzling smile.
The phrasing is interesting in that it makes Chanel the woman sound like a good suit. Later, when Boy asks Etienne if he can "borrow" Coco for a few days, the way you'd ask for the loan of a sweater, our hearts sink for her. Any happiness she has seems likely to be fleeting, but he, like so much else in the film, is a provider of inspiration. His shirts, his pajamas, his own elegance will eventually be reflected in her clothing. They are emblems of him, but also hold pieces of her past; her simple life of poverty is just as influential.
Those who love fashion will be intrigued by this, at least to a point, after which Coco Before Chanel starts to feel like witnessing a sponge at work in the act of absorption. That's not generally the stuff of compelling cinema. We prefer the end results of a personal education rather than the acquisition of it. If Project Runway were about the formation of the designers' sensibilities rather than the creative execution of that sensibility, would anyone watch? This automatically puts Fontaine's film at a disadvantage, and the truly enigmatic nature of her subject only compounds it. "You want, but you don't know what," Emilienne tells Coco, and the movie keeps us at that same remove. It may be too respectful of the legend it seeks to illuminate.
Tatou is far prettier than Chanel was, which isn't any kind of insult, given that she's also prettier than 99.99% of human beings. And her almost black, knowing but unknowable eyes lend themselves to portraying mystery. But as lovely as she is, she's not someone to whom style comes naturally. A person with innate style can put on a sailor shirt and make you want to run out and get exactly that shirt. You put on that shirt and realize you don't have "it," that you imitate but don't emulate. Tatou in Chanel's beloved sailor shirt doesn't have "it" either, as much as you want her to. This is not her fault; this odd, nearly undefinable gift can be fostered, as we see with Coco herself, but not if you weren't already born with something that goes beyond grace or physical beauty. If it could be bottled, one wonders, would such a thing smell like Chanel No. 5?
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Two possibly game-changing reviews from two important papers:
NYTimes
The Unsentimental Education That Preceded a Life of Fashion
By A. O. SCOTT Published: September 25, 2009
True to its title, “Coco Before Chanel” chronicles the early life of the woman who would become perhaps the single most influential figure in 20th-century fashion. But the film, directed and co-written by Anne Fontaine, bears less resemblance to a standard-issue biopic (like, say, “La Vie en Rose,” to take a recent French example) than to a novel by Émile Zola or Theodore Dreiser. With a mixture of brutal candor and tender sympathy, it charts the rise of an ambitious, difficult woman, taking note of the obstacles and opportunities offered by her time, place and circumstances.
The tale begins in an orphanage, where the Chanel sisters, Gabrielle and Adrienne, have been deposited by their father. An inkling of Gabrielle’s eventual vocation is provided when the audience is directed to notice her noticing the stitching on the nuns’ wimples, but for the most part Ms. Fontaine avoids the easy prefiguring that deadens so many film biographies.
She also steers clear of the kind of literal-minded psychologizing that finds the germ of future greatness in childhood trauma. Gabrielle and Adrienne, grown into Audrey Tautou and Marie Gillain, wind up in a provincial music hall, singing mildly naughty songs — one, about a lost dog named Coco, provides the nickname with which Gabrielle becomes famous — and trying not to be mistaken for the prostitutes who also frequent the place. Gabrielle, chain-smoking and sarcastic, confronts the world, and the men in it, with a wariness that borders on hostility.
She is, from the start, a complicated, frequently uncharming character, and Ms. Tautou’s fierce and sinewy performance represents a decisive break with the dimpled-pixie typecasting she has been struggling against since “Amélie.” One fact of Gabrielle’s life is that a woman without money or status can only acquire them by attaching herself to a man, ideally as a wife but more plausibly as a mistress. And so Adrienne finds a baron to keep her, while Gabrielle, after some combative flirting, hooks up with a playboy in uniform, a worldly and cynical fellow named Étienne Balsan (Benoît Poelvoorde).
The relationship between them is affectionate, exploitive, transactional and unpredictable, and it is the most interesting aspect of “Coco Before Chanel.” With a mixture of impulsiveness and blunt premeditation Coco shows up at Étienne’s country mansion, where she installs herself as his mistress. His treatment of her is alternately gallant and appalling. For a long time he sequesters her in a back room and instructs her to eat in the kitchen, where she won’t be seen by his high society friends.
But Coco crashes their parties, befriending a flamboyant actress named Emilienne (Emmanuelle Devos) and catching the eye of an English businessman known as Boy Capel (Alessandro Nivola). His soulful sensitivity makes him appear to be everything Étienne is not, and he offers Coco and the film a vision of true love.
Ms. Fontaine indulges this romanticism but also points out the loose strings and sticking points. Boy, Coco’s ideal lover, is also something of an adventurer, a serial seducer whose only advantage over Étienne may be that he has better looks and better game. As far as acting is concerned, Mr. Poelvoorde wins. He plays each facet of Étienne’s repellent, gracious, selfish and sad personality with dazzling relish.
In any case, such judgments are not really on the movie’s agenda. Rather than take a moralizing or pitying view of its characters, who live according to the social mores of their era and the logic of their desires, Ms. Fontaine examines them with curiosity and compassion.
The result is an unusually vivid and convincing account of the historical past, composed in the present tense. Though its mood and methods are different, “Coco Before Chanel” shares with Jane Campion’s “Bright Star” — another new anti-biopic — a fascination, at once intense and dispassionate, with the lives of women in earlier centuries. Coco and Fanny Brawne, the heroine of Ms. Campion’s film, are not victims of oppression or paragons of resistance but rather individuals, made not of ideology or wishful thinking but of flesh and blood.
And clothes of course. Both Fanny and Coco start out as seamstresses with an eye for novelty and a keen aesthetic sense. Coco disdains corsets, sometimes dresses in men’s garments, and adapts simple hats and fisherman’s shirts to marvelously chic effect. The blossoming of her ambition, as much as her love life, drives the story forward, and turns “Coco Before Chanel” into a costume drama worthy of the name.
“Coco Before Chanel” is rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned). It has sexual situations and a lot of cigarettes. No nudity, though, which would be a distraction from all those lovely clothes.
LA Times/Kenny Turan
MOVIE REVIEW 'Coco Before Chanel' Director Anne Fontaine illuminates the fashion icon by focusing on her formative years. September 25, 2009
For someone who was as celebrated internationally as France's Gabrielle "Coco" Chanel, the woman who inspired dozens of biographies by changing the shape of 20th century fashion, not that much is known for sure about her formative years.
"Chanel lied all the time. She used to say, 'I invented my life because I didn't like my life,' " Anne Fontaine has said, with Audrey Tautou adding, "Chanel always disguised the reality. It takes some cunning to know who Chanel really was."
Though Chanel's reticence may sound like a barrier to filmmakers, it stimulated co-writer and director Fontaine and star Tautou, who've combined to turn "Coco Before Chanel" into a superior filmed biography that brings intelligence, restraint and style to what could have been a more standard treatment.
The most obvious credit goes to the strong, sure performance of Tautou, who costarred in "The Da Vinci Code" following her breakthrough in the successful "Amélie." Tautou not only resembles Chanel, she inhabits the role completely, using flashing eyes and a relentless intelligence to convey the unbending strength of a woman determined to make something of her life in a time and place when that was far from the norm.
The decision to focus "Coco" on the fashion designer's formative years was made by Fontaine, who cast Tautou before the script was written. One of the most interesting of contemporary French directors, Fontaine's earlier films, particularly "Dry Cleaning" and "How I Killed My Father," brought empathy and tact to emotionally complex stories of troubled and troubling relationships.
Though "Coco Before Chanel" is much less edgy than those earlier films, it shares with them a sensitive interest in the destiny of society's outsiders. And no one was more outside the system than Gabrielle Chanel, born poor in rural France and, after her mother died, abandoned by her father to be brought up in an orphanage run by nuns.
It's in the nature of "Coco Before Chanel" that we have the advantage over its subject: We know Chanel's career arc, her success at turning fashion almost inside out by creating clothes for women that allowed for movement and freedom. And the film uses that by letting us notice things, such as the unusual black and white habits of the Aubazine order that might have influenced the designer almost without her knowing it. After the orphanage years, we see Chanel around the turn of the century living with her sister Adrienne (the character, played by Marie Gillain, is a composite of Chanel's real life sister and aunt). Based in the town of Moulins, they are trying, without much success, to succeed as cabaret singers, though Chanel does acquire the nickname "Coco" after a famous song of the day.
Even in these early days, the key elements of Chanel's personality -- her sharp tongue and formidable will -- are present and accounted for. A gift for survival was one of this young Napoleon's strengths, though at the time neither she nor anyone else had any idea exactly what world she would be conquering.
Then, as often happens with ambitious folk, fate takes a hand in Chanel's life, not once, but several times. First she meets the wealthy horse fancier and playboy Etienne Balsan (the marvelous Belgian actor Benoit Poelvoorde) and ends up living in his chateau as his mistress.
Bored beyond measure and aghast at the way fashionable people dress, Chanel raids Balsan's closet to create clothes for herself.
She also meets a popular stage actress (Emmanuelle Devos) who is so wild about the hats Chanel has designed for her own use she starts to wear them herself.
Another friend of Balsan's who has an even bigger influence on Chanel is Arthur "Boy" Capel (Alessandro Nivola), a wealthy Briton who so believed in her work he financed her first Paris shop. Capel was also the star-crossed love of Chanel's life, and her struggle to allow herself to feel an emotion she had refused to believe existed is one of the film's most interesting dynamics.
"I know how to express the present," Chanel liked to say, and showing us just how that expression took form and shape is the accomplishment of this satisfying film.
I love women seen as "difficult", pushing the envelope and changing the way we view the world. I would have seen this regardless of good reviews, but the above two (even though I'm not huge fans of either) is extremely encouraging.
Posts: 14001 | Location: canada | Registered: December 22, 2005
Like La Vie en rose, this film (and the second one also from Sony Classics) manages to fail to mention that the person portrayed was quite happy to befriend Nazis in Paris during the occupation.
Not remotely. She was apparently pretty anti-Semitic and quite comfortable around Nazis.
‘Coco Avant Chanel’ fails to mention legendary fashion designer’s anti-Semitism By Sophie Taylor FIRST POSTED APRIL 22, 200 9Audrey Tautou, one of the darlings of the French cinema since her appearance in the 2001 hit film Amelie, opens in cinemas across France today in an new film about the iconic French designer Coco Chanel. However, Coco Avant Chanel stops short of depicting an aspect of the pioneering couturier the French would rather forget – that she was a renowned Nazi collaborator and anti-Semite.
The Coco Chanel story is one of France's favourite fairytales. Abandoned by her father and with her mother dead, Gabrielle Chanel - her real name - was brought up by nuns who taught her to sew. From those humble beginnings she grew to become one of the world's best loved designers - famed for tailoring men's fashion to women's needs, inventing the little black dress and introducing round-necked jackets and quilted handbags to wardrobes around the world.
However, there is a darker side to her story. It was often said that she was prepared to sleep with the right people to get ahead and, after the Germans occupied France in 1940, Chanel conducted an affair with the Nazi officer Hans Gunther von Dincklage at Paris’s Ritz hotel, thus becoming one of France's notorious "horizontal collaborators".
In his book, 1940-1945 Annees Erotiques, the French historian Patrick Buisson details how some of his country's best-loved icons disgraced themselves during the war. "Coco Chanel or the actress Arletty [star of Les Enfants du Paradis] were the incarnation of the values of France: insolence, freedom and in Chanel's case elegance," Buisson told the Guardian. "In their own way, each was an icon. The fact that they could fall for the occupier was not just a transgression, it was damaging for the national conscience.”
Similar sentiments are expressed by Carmen Callil in her recent book Bad Faith: A Forgotten History of Family, Fatherland and Vichy France where Chanel is described as "indomitably anti-Semitic". Chanel even tried to use the law banning Jews from owning businesses to wrest control of her perfume business from the Wertheimer family: she failed and the Wertheimers own House of Chanel, along with various vineyards, to this day.
Such was Chanel's collusion with the Nazis that at one point after the war she was arrested and charged with war crimes before being mysteriously released.
None of this, however, is dealt with in French director Anne Fontaine's new film which, as the title suggests, deals with her early years when she tried to be a singer - hence the nickname Coco - and battled her way into the fashion business.
Tautou, who is taking over from Nicole Kidman as the face of Chanel No. 5, has said of Chanel: "She was a very hard, very authoritarian, very proud character and at the same time, this was a period of her life when her character wasn't entirely formed." That's one way of putting it.
Originally posted by seanflynn: Like La Vie en rose, this film (and the second one also from Sony Classics) manages to fail to mention that the person portrayed was quite happy to befriend Nazis in Paris during the occupation.
I had heard that Coco Chanel had at least one lover who was a prominent Nazi when reading criticism of the recent Coco Chanel TV movie that glossed over this part of her past. I just looked it up and her boyfriend was Nazi officer and spy Hans Gunther von Dincklage and because of their involvement she was arrested for war crimes and shunned in France for many years. Countries other than France went gaga for her designs.
That being said I do not think that part of her life would be covered in this film that seems to end with her entrance into the fashion world. The Nazi collaboration would not come until later.
This message has been edited. Last edited by: pacinofan,
Posts: 27338 | Location: Phoenix, AZ | Registered: February 02, 2003
Looks like there are three cruddy Chanel films on the circuit this year. When it rains it pours I suppose, or maybe in this case when it pukes it gushes...
"Notorious was nice, but it’s not in the color purple range" "Angels and Demons may get nominated for cinematography the imagery was profound" "District Nine will definitely win for best foreign film it made money and everyone loved it" ~ 8movies
Posts: 2771 | Location: nz | Registered: January 12, 2009
Originally posted by seanflynn: Like La Vie en rose, this film (and the second one also from Sony Classics) manages to fail to mention that the person portrayed was quite happy to befriend Nazis in Paris during the occupation.
Well, even if there are no Nazis, at least there're no singing nuns, right, seanflynn?
Originally posted by puxzkkx: Looks like there are three cruddy Chanel films on the circuit this year. When it rains it pours I suppose, or maybe in this case when it pukes it gushes...
Lucky for you you've seem them already puxxy. Why not, write them up for us? I know you hate them, and I do enjoy derisive reviews.
Posts: 14001 | Location: canada | Registered: December 22, 2005
Originally posted by seanflynn: Not remotely. She was apparently pretty anti-Semitic and quite comfortable around Nazis.
‘Coco Avant Chanel’ fails to mention legendary fashion designer’s anti-Semitism By Sophie Taylor FIRST POSTED APRIL 22, 200 9Audrey Tautou, one of the darlings of the French cinema since her appearance in the 2001 hit film Amelie, opens in cinemas across France today in an new film about the iconic French designer Coco Chanel. However, Coco Avant Chanel stops short of depicting an aspect of the pioneering couturier the French would rather forget – that she was a renowned Nazi collaborator and anti-Semite.
The Coco Chanel story is one of France's favourite fairytales. Abandoned by her father and with her mother dead, Gabrielle Chanel - her real name - was brought up by nuns who taught her to sew. From those humble beginnings she grew to become one of the world's best loved designers - famed for tailoring men's fashion to women's needs, inventing the little black dress and introducing round-necked jackets and quilted handbags to wardrobes around the world.
However, there is a darker side to her story. It was often said that she was prepared to sleep with the right people to get ahead and, after the Germans occupied France in 1940, Chanel conducted an affair with the Nazi officer Hans Gunther von Dincklage at Paris’s Ritz hotel, thus becoming one of France's notorious "horizontal collaborators".
In his book, 1940-1945 Annees Erotiques, the French historian Patrick Buisson details how some of his country's best-loved icons disgraced themselves during the war. "Coco Chanel or the actress Arletty [star of Les Enfants du Paradis] were the incarnation of the values of France: insolence, freedom and in Chanel's case elegance," Buisson told the Guardian. "In their own way, each was an icon. The fact that they could fall for the occupier was not just a transgression, it was damaging for the national conscience.”
Similar sentiments are expressed by Carmen Callil in her recent book Bad Faith: A Forgotten History of Family, Fatherland and Vichy France where Chanel is described as "indomitably anti-Semitic". Chanel even tried to use the law banning Jews from owning businesses to wrest control of her perfume business from the Wertheimer family: she failed and the Wertheimers own House of Chanel, along with various vineyards, to this day.
Such was Chanel's collusion with the Nazis that at one point after the war she was arrested and charged with war crimes before being mysteriously released.
None of this, however, is dealt with in French director Anne Fontaine's new film which, as the title suggests, deals with her early years when she tried to be a singer - hence the nickname Coco - and battled her way into the fashion business.
Tautou, who is taking over from Nicole Kidman as the face of Chanel No. 5, has said of Chanel: "She was a very hard, very authoritarian, very proud character and at the same time, this was a period of her life when her character wasn't entirely formed." That's one way of putting it.
I'm sorry sean, but I'm not convinced that she was, an antisemite; although I had heard this as a child. There's quite a bit of hard evidence that she had dealings with the Nazi's though. But, who didnt at that time?
Just as, I dont believe for a minute that, Kubrick was a strong misogynist, or that the Coen brothers are condescending, or that David Lynch is an evil right-winger.
This reminds me of, the demonization of Richard 3. Tudor propaganda. We might never know how true any of it is.
jmho.
Posts: 14001 | Location: canada | Registered: December 22, 2005
I don't know enough to say if she was conclusively antisemitic; her collaboration with the Nazis though was at least opportunistic and possibly enthusiastic from what I've read. She was worse than Piaf (La Vie en rose managed in its frenetic out of order editing to ignore the entire Occupation).
I have nothing against strong women; its Chanel's other apparent qualities that bother me.
Anti-semitism was rampant in France in the 1930s, particularly among the Parisian elites, so this wouldn't be at all unusual.
This message has been edited. Last edited by: seanflynn,
