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 In cinemas from Thursday [PG]
Director: Anne Fontaine
Runtime: 110mins
Coco Avant Chanel tells the rags-to-riches story of Gabrielle ‘Coco’ Chanel (Audrey Tatou). It follows her from the orphanage where she and her sister are abandoned by her father, to the cabaret bar where she sings the song that gives her that nickname, to the tailor’s shop where she works as a seamstress, to the château where she associates with the wealthy and finally to Paris where she becomes a fashion designer. Along the way, Chanel attempts to find her place in pre-war French society where her only options seem to be being a seamstress or being someone’s mistress.
She’s also torn between two lovers, the degenerate French officer Etienne Balsan (Benoit Poelvoorde) and English business tycoon and polo player Arthur ‘Boy’ Capel (Alessandro Nivola). It’s interesting to see the Englishman portrayed as the exotic one, surrounded as he is by stereotypical, boorishly extravagant French fops. His comparative simplicity speaks to Chanel’s preference for elegance and her distaste with French women’s fashion – tight corsets, hats that look like cakes and flouncy white dress-trains. She’d much rather dress like him, in blazers and polo shirts.
Pursing her mouth – this is as serious and still as Tatou has been in any movie I’ve seen – she rejects her era’s fashions to make her own clothes by taking scissors to the outfits of the men in her life in some of the movie’s best scenes. She wears pants, refuses to ride side-saddle and generally does all of the things women do in period movies to show how forward-thinking they are, only it’s all true. In liberating herself from corsets she happens to invent modern French chic and the little black dress as well as bringing about the flapper look of the 1920s while she’s at it.
However, Coco Avant Chanel sidelines this story about changing fashions and attitudes in favour of a love story. It ends in the early days of her rise to fashion goddess and empire founder; this is ‘Coco Before Chanel’. It’s one of those biopics like Walk The Line that focusses on the early years of its subject’s life when it’s all young love and rising ambition, at the expense of later struggles and more complicated issues. Half of her story goes untold in favour of another love story. Fortunately it’s a good love story, well-performed. The costumes, appropriately enough, are excellent.
***½
JODY MACGREGOR
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