MOVIE REVIEW – Coco Before Chanel

Coco avant Chanel (Coco Before Chanel)
Director: Anne Fontaine
Writers: Screenplay by Anne Fontaine and Camille Fontaine, in collaboration with Christopher Hampton and Jacques Fieschi, freely adapted from the book L’irrégulière ou mon Itinéraire Chanel by Edmonde Charles-Roux
Producers: Caroline Benjo, Philippe Carcassone, Carole Scotte
Stars: Audrey Tautou, Benoît Poelvoorde, Alessandro Nivola, Marie Gillain, Emmanuelle Devos

“I gave women a sense of freedom; I gave them back their bodies: bodies that were drenched in sweat, due to fashion’s finery, lace, corsets, underclothes, padding.”
-Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel

She enters the great house with the confidence of the cat who wants all to know she has consented to make this her shelter. She has a poise that upsets your prejudice, but it is still a fragile one. Coco Chanel made her fame by designing fashion, but she began by designing herself – from her dark and distancing eyes to the wardrobe that sought to level the gender playing field.

Coco Before Chanel could have been a movie about the legendary little black dress and its many cousins produced during Chanel’s career. That would have been a sexy and photogenic movie indeed. But co-writer/director Anne Fontaine wants to find the woman inside the dress, and that is exactly the path outlined by Chanel’s design philosophy. She de-emphasized the body and the accessories so the woman could celebrate inner qualities they might not know they had. And we see in this narrative of her early womanhood that she conducted her life and affairs in this way too – because men could have her body, but the deeper and more valuable treasure of her spirit was reserved for a special few. Maybe even only one.

A great biopic rests on two poles: an idea on how to tell the story of a life that marries well with a truth about that life; and a performance that feels alive and realized within that idea. Fontaine and her screenplay collaborators achieve the former, and then astound in the latter by casting the French actress Audrey Tautou – what an achievement, to take the woman who played Amélie, and have her look as if a smile does not come naturally to her.

All we see of the young Gabrielle’s father is his back, as he takes her to an orphanage where his poverty has forced him to leave her. While this casts her in lonely resentment it is equally an opportunity to build her own legacy; as she grows, she tells fanciful lies about her father and upbringing. The orphanage is also where she learns to sew, a trade that makes her better equipped for independence than a woman of finer breeding.

Her life is a long story of overturning such weaknesses and making them into strengths. Fontaine is calculating in the way she poses Tautou in the camera frame to emphasize that Chanel stands apart; first by circumstance, later by conscious will. She grows into a young woman with charming directness and willpower, but a fierce and mercurial temperament as armor. Singing in a cabaret with her sister (Marie Gillain), she attracts the attention of horse-breeding playboy Étienne Balsan (Benoît Poelvoorde); and she assumes her way into his spacious country home, where they have occasional sex, and she wanders through his garish parties, observing as drunken boors chase over-fripperized doll-women who do not know how else to interest them.

But her primary tool for maintaining Balsan’s attention, when he has such a history of growing bored with lovers, is in being persistently fascinating, and in refusing to ever fully submit. Having never needed to work for a living he is both vivacious and idle, but honest about it and distinctly charming. Their ever-stirring mix of respect for one another, and the ways in which they feign indifference while maintaining a strong bond, are a radical spiting of the socially acceptable categories of male and female interaction in the early 20th century.

And yet she is not complete. She might tell herself that by guarding her independence from Balsan she has conquered the idea of love, but has no preparation at all for the moment when a handsome industrialist (Alessandro Nivola) gazes at her, sees this common-born woman, dressed in plain comfort, with a fullness far more intimate than sex, and speaks two words that ignite her insides: “You’re elegant”.

One of Fontaine’s tasks as a filmmaker is to help us peek behind Chanel’s vision, to understand the way she gravitated towards the honesty of simple colors and strong, solid lines. And with the help of cinematographer Christophe Beaucarne she creates a number of subtle and beguiling compositions that help us see the forms that drew her. But Fontaine must also show us living progress – a woman who is not yet the icon Coco, but whose heart is still being hammered into shape by fortune and her own daring. The movie dramatizes in many ways the limited options available to a woman of that time, her determination to surmount those barriers is depicted not as romance but defiance.

Coco Before Chanel is not a story of a sympathetic or easily-loved woman; but it is the story of a woman who is unafraid to be complex, and that is its success. Tautou knows how to refrain from asking our sympathies because that is something Chanel would never do. Nor does she ask for love, nor worship. But with dignity and passion she declares her confident expectation that you will take her as she is – a multifaceted person, blossoming under devastatingly simple clothing.