Coco avant Chanel (2009) - film review

In the 1890s, Gabrielle and her sister, two little orphan girls, find themselves in an austere convent school where they wait in vain for their father to collect them.  The years pass and, now lively adolescents, they attempt to find work as singers in order to escape a life of drudgery as seamstresses.  It is whilst performing at a rowdy café that Gabrielle meets Balsan, a wealthy aristrocrat and libertine who refuses to call her by any other name than Coco.  A short while later, Gabrielle decides to give up her job as a couturiere’s assistant so that she can live a more comfortable life as Balsan’s mistress.  But Gabrielle, now known to all as Coco, soon grows tired of luxury and tedious social occasions; she longs to make her own way in the world.  A chance encounter with a handsome English businessman, Boy Capel, appears to offer her a way out.  Not only does Capel draw her into an intense and potentially scandalous love affair, he also offers her the financial support she needs to start her own fashion business.  Coco achieves success, but only after she has endured the cruellest of tragedies...

Forty years after her death, Coco Chanel remains the most elusive and intriguing entrepreneur of her generation, a trail blazer for female emancipation and icon of the fashion world.   In her most ambitious film to date, director Anne Fontaine makes a valiant attempt to go beyond the myth of the world’s best-known fashion designer and show us how it was that an abandoned orphan girl could rise above the conventions of her day to become one of the most famous women of the 20th century.  Whilst the film is only partly successful in meeting this objective, it is a lavish period piece that impresses as much with its production design as with its performances from a high calibre cast.  Fontaine matches the production standards of a comparable Hollywood biopic but tacitly avoids the lazy cliché-adorned over-simplification to which the latter is notoriously prone.  Coco avant Chanel is an uncompromisingly brutal film about frustrated love and fraught ambition told from a distinctly feminine perspective.  The central dichotomy of Coco Chanel, the tortured personality thriving in a world of glamour, is effectively conveyed by the film’s juxtaposition of sublime visual elegance and a bleak Brontë-esque romanticism, the artificial and the real locked in a mocking parody of a loving embrace.

Before making this film, Fontaine distinguished herself with her darkly introspective studies of human desire and sexuality, notably Nettoyage à sec (1997), Nathalie... (2003) and Entre ses mains (2005).  The oppressive, slightly seedy tone that best characterises Fontaine’s films is surprisingly well-suited for an intimate study of Coco Chanel, a fin de siècele woman whose personal ambitions and romantic leanings were constantly challenged by the conventions of her day.  To achieve her aims, Chanel must make the kind of compromises which today would be almost unthinkable, and the one thing the film does get across well is how difficult it was for a woman of her time to rise above male chauvinism and forge her own career and identity.  The unfaltering mood of oppression that pervades the film may weaken its emotional impact but it powerfully conveys a sense of just what Coco Chanel was up against, and consequently how great her achievements were.

Audrey Tautou is an inspired casting choice for the lead role of Coco Chanel.  There’s next to no trace of little Amélie here - Tautou is no longer the elfin debutant but a fully fledged actress capable of subtly conveying the fluctuating inner moods of her character without even seeming to act.  Tautou’s androgynous appearance and restraint as an actress make her ideal for the part of the enigmatic fashion designer who totally redefined femininity in the 1920s whilst revealing next to nothing about herself.  Tautou’s portrayal of Coco Chanel is suitably ambiguous and skilfully underplayed, showing just enough to make the audience interested in her character and allowing their imagination to fill in the blanks.  Like reflections seen in distorting mirrors, it is the impact that Coco has on those around her (notably her lovers, played with great finesse by Benoît Poelvoorde and Alessandro Nivola) that allows us to piece together her complex personality, but beware - reflections can be misleading and contradictory.  At the end of the film, the Coco Chanel myth remains intact and we realise that, whilst we feel we know a little more about her, she remains something of a mystery.  Jan Kounen’s Coco Chanel et Igor Stravinsky (2009), released just a few months after this film, picks up more or less where this one ends (almost seamlessly) and sheds a little more light on the woman who is now considered one of the great creative influences of the last century.

© James Travers 2011

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This was supposed to be a film about a working woman who came from orphanage and made it to the top without a man, the story of the world famous Coco Chanel.  When one thinks of Coco Chanel, one thinks of admiration, stark elegance and the little black dress.  Surely this woman had to fight her way to the top?  Surely she had rivals and critics?  Wouldn’t it be interesting to know about that, about how this workaholic of immovable countenance took all that criticism deep down?  That’s what I thought too.  Well this film won’t explain that for you.  Aside from the acting, which is generally good, the film lacks any sort of climax or emotional insight and has an ending so abrupt and meaningless that you wonder where the director was going in the first place. It’s a typical love story that didn’t even make me cry (and I cry in commercials advertising the Olympic games).  Informative, but a big disappointment.
Victoria (Langely)  

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