Affair rendered tiresome despite erotic potential

This subtitled French film reproduces a couple of key moments in the sensual history of the 20th century.

One is when fashion designer Coco Chanel visited a perfumery to select the scent that would be Chanel No. 5.

The other incident kicks off the film: the 1913 debut of Le sacre du printemps (Rite of Spring), composer Igor Stravinsky's notorious collaboration with Serge Diaghilev's Ballets Russes. This was the work that compelled conservative Paris theatregoers "accustomed to Swan Lake and Sleeping Beauty" to riotous behaviour. Faced with Stravinsky's boldly sexual, thrusting soundscapes coupled with Vaslav Nijinsky's decidedly non-classic choreography, only a small portion of the audience appreciated the genius of the undertaking.

Among that select throng was Chanel (actress Anna Mouglalis once modelled Chanel). A woman who would herself shake up the staid Edwardian realm of fashion with her radical, liberating designs, she is captivated. She even bears witness to a flash of the anger and recriminations flying between Nijinsky and Stravinsky (Mads Mikkelsen) following the performance.

But Chanel and Stravinsky do not meet properly for another seven years, and their relationship develops into something very improper indeed.

Stravinsky lives and works in a squalid hotel with his consumptive wife Katarina (Elena Morozova) and their brood of four children. Chanel, in mourning after the death of her lover (a relationship scrutinized in last year's Audrey Tautou film Coco Before Chanel) offers her patronage to Stravinsky in the form of a lavishly elegant summer home where he may compose in comfort.

The arrangement provides a needed respite from poverty (which apparently led to his wife's illness) and puts a fire under Stravinsky creatively. But Chanel herself is the fly in the perfume pot, as she exchanges knowing looks with Stravinsky and the sexual tension becomes so thick, you could cut it with a knife. And since it's all happening under the nose of Katarina, one guesses tension isn't the only thing the beleaguered Mrs. Stravinsky would like to cut with a knife.

Even allowing for the moral miasma of that central relationship, this is a film with formidable erotic potential. But director Jan Kounen, working from a screenplay by Chris Greenhalgh, tends to render the affair tiresome. With its abundance of wordless, lupine gazes and sterile, tastefully framed lovemaking scenes, Kounen might just as well be making a documentary on the mating habits of wolves.

It makes one nostalgic for the excesses of a Ken Russell, who documented the lives of Stravinsky's predecessors Tchaikovsky and Liszt (The Music Lovers and Lisztomania respectively) with such frenzied abandon. Russell may have done a disservice to the historic figures, but at least captured something of the spirit and fevered emotion of the music itself.

Kounen doesn't make that effort, and perhaps he was at a disadvantage anyway: When it comes to the realm of the erotic, the Romantics had it all over the Moderns.

With a cumbersome two-hour running time, Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky mainly has its value as a visual history of the era. Of the cast, it is actually Elena Morozova who gives the story an earthly emotional grounding as the wounded Katarina.

But most of the film's heat could just as well be appreciated from a soundtrack CD.

randall.king@freepress.mb.ca

Other Voices

Selected excerpts from reviews of Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky.

Beautiful but indulgent.

-- Dan Kois, Washington Post

This French film's beginning is as brilliant as anything I've seen all year; unfortunately, most of the rest of the movie never lives up to that.

-- Ken Hanke, Mountain Xpress

The whole movie has the immaculate visual gloss of a Chanel advert, which is no bad thing.

-- Steve Rose, Guardian (UK)

While it's not a particularly imaginative movie, it's a great-looking one...

-- David Edwards, Daily Mirror (UK)

A beautifully designed but overly formal biopic that can't match the greatness of the artists it depicts.

-- Patrick Peters, Empire magazine

Strikingly shot and superbly acted by Mikkelsen and Mouglalis...

-- Matthew Turner, Viewlondon

-- Compiled by Shane Minkin

Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky

Starring Mads Mikkelsen and Anna Mouglalis

Globe

14A

2 1/2 stars out of 5

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition September 10, 2010 D5