Movies

Winnipeg Free Press - PRINT EDITION

Classic fashion queen remains a beautifully dressed enigma

By: Jay Stone

7/11/2009 1:00 AM | Comments: 0

There seems to be no end of interest in Coco Chanel: much more than you would have suspected could have been generated by a collarless white jacket or a little black dress. Coco has come to mean something: female liberation,, or the gritty self-determination that takes one from an orphanage to one's own fashion house. Or maybe it's that she's a great movie subject because the costumes are sure to be sensational.

But Chanel never really emerges from Coco Avant Chanel, Anne Fontaine's retelling of the early years. Coco was in many ways a self-invention -- in the film she lies consistently about all aspects of her childhood -- so the movie, based on Edmonde Charles-Roux's book L'Irreguliere, is something of an educated guess. An educated guess in great hats.

MOVIE REVIEW

Coco Avant Chanel

Starring Audrey Tautou and Allesandro Nivola

Grant Park

Three stars out of five

The facts, as we see them, are that Gabrielle Chanel and her sister Adrienne are dropped off at an orphanage by their faithless father, and 15 years later they are Audrey Tautou and Marie Gillain, singing in a provincial cabaret in turn-of-the-century France. Their signature song, Coco at the Trocadero, provides Gabrielle's nickname.

At the cabaret, Coco meets Etienne Balsan (Benoît Poelvoorde), a millionaire horse-owner, and she shows up at his castle one day to insinuate herself into his life.

"You can stay two days," he tells her, and indeed, several years later she does leave. In the meantime, she becomes his mistress/plaything -- at one stage, Balsan "loans" her to a friend, an Englishman named Arthur (Boy) Capel (Alessandro Nivola), who may have been the love of her life, although Coco was a bit prickly about that.

"A woman in love is helpless," she says. "Like a begging dog." And Coco Chanel had no intention of being a begging dog.

In the final scene, Coco sits on the steps of a fashion show as a parade of her dresses go by. She wears a Chanel suit. Coco Avant Chanel is in many ways about the cost of that suit.

Picking through the Chanel myth, Fontaine discovers a hard-edged young woman who holds the aristocracy in contempt, although she is happy to lie around all day reading, hating Balsan's friends and being inspired by the passing fashion parade. Tautou has the look of Chanel, but she is pretty well confined to two expressions, sulking and flirting. It isn't until late in the picture, when she feels she may be falling in love, that we see any of the fire that could have driven such a woman.

The movie meanders through this story, more concerned with naturalistic settings and fashionable accoutrements.

Still, naturalistic settings and fashionable accoutrements are nothing to sneeze at, and Coco Avant Chanel finds resonance when it sends Tautou to a costume party wearing a cut-down men's suit and wide hat.

As for the woman inside the clothes, she remains a mystery, someone who -- like a polo shirt that she converts into a cardigan sweater -- has been altered so much it's impossible to know who she really was. The costumes, however, are sensational.

-- Canwest News Service

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition November 7, 2009 C13

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