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Directed by Anne Fontaine
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Coco before Chanel It’s so rare that
so-called biopics have an interest for us as a film
rather than as a reciting of their subject’s life (think
“Amelia”) that we can be grateful to “Coco Before
Chanel” because it has a fascinating story and an almost novelistic
unraveling of its subject. Coco
Chanel (played here by Audrey Tautou) was probably
the defining incarnation of fashion in the twentieth century, bringing women
out of corsets and petticoats and into a wardrobe fitted to their bodies
rather than to some ideal of Victorian womanhood. More than that, though,
Coco Chanel was a fascinating and difficult woman to know, and director Anne
Fontaine is able to give us a sense of that complexity without slowing her
film down with details. Coco –
who was named Gabrielle – and her sister Marie – were left at an
orphanage by their father when they were perhaps seven or eight. Cut to fifteen years later, and they
are a duo singing racy songs at a cafe for an audience of slumming men and
the whores who service them, where their only chance for a better life will
be to find a man and be his mistress – never his wife, however. Marie finds a baron and
installs herself as his mistress; Coco tries to make it alone but is taken up
by a wealthy man named Ētienne Balsan, who owns race-horses and entertains
constantly. He tries to keep Coco
hidden from his upper-class guests, but she insists on joining them. She is busy sewing her own hats and
clothes, and begins making hats for Balsan’s
other women. When people ask her
about her youth, she makes up different stories; to this day, in fact, no one
really knows what exactly was the truth. While at Balsan’s she falls in love with a man known by the
nickname Boy (Alessandro Nivola), an Englishman who
tells her that he is rich and has made his fortune in the coal business. He says he’ll marry her and take
her with him to England, but the reality turns out to be quite different, and
then he dies in an auto accident.
The welcome surprise in
“Coco Before Chanel” is Audrey Tautou,
who plays Coco with a wonderful steeliness and the allure of mystery about
her. Now in her thirties, she has
matured far beyond her winsome charm as Amelie,
though her glorious overbite is still, thank God, with her. In addition, director Anne Fontaine
has composed shots that are luscious in every way without being imitative of
other period pieces. In addition,
she has removed Tautou’s air of childlike
innocence without making her a cipher; she is the most fascinating person in
the film, perhaps rivaled only by Benoit Poelvoorde
who plays the wealthy Balsan, who cannot marry her
but loves her anyway. |