The experience of watching most movie biopics is like being told
about a dream an acquaintance had: It’s rarely as interesting as it was
to the person who had it. When biographical films have been successful
recently, it’s because they’ve leavened the inherent genre negatives by
basing the film on a lesser-known subject (Milk), by focusing on
the person behind the persona (Ali), or by benefiting from a
great performance (Ray) or the participation of a masterful
filmmaker (The Aviator).
The new biopic Coco Before Chanel, about the celebrated
20th-century fashion designer, gets the benefit of a little bit of each
of these. Chanel is an icon for what she produced (and the effect it
had), but I suspect her life story is new information to the majority
of viewers, even excluding those like me: males born after she died who
know the name and nothing else.
Audrey Tautou (Amélie, Dirty Pretty Things)
stars as Coco. Her performance is excellent in a naturalistic way,
eschewing the sentiment of the character’s inevitable greatness and
embracing the boundaries of the film’s title (excepting one gorgeous
scene at the end of the film).
We first meet Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel as she’s installed at an
orphanage in 1893 along with her sister, Adrienne (played in adulthood
by Marie Gillain), abandoned by their father. Fifteen years later, Coco
is performing duets with her sister in a saloon — her nickname
comes from a song they sing about a dog. Coco’s bored by the charms of
wealthy, vapid playboys visiting the bar, and she fends off their
advances with frowns and lines such as, “A woman in love is helpless
like a begging dog.”
Coco envisions a future as a stage performer in a nice club in Paris
— sewing is her day job, as a seamstress at a tailor shop, but at
first it’s more menial labor than a prospect for her fortunes. When her
sister escapes the life by becoming the paramour of an affluent man,
Coco follows suit and aggressively chases the attention of the
aristocrat Balsan (Benoît Poelvoorde).
As she progresses in society, her instincts for clothing design and
alterations catch the eye of increasingly influential people. She also
meets the love of her life, Arthur “Boy” Capel (Alessandro Nivola), a
rich English polo player who acts as muse and financier to her budding
fashion inclinations. In the main, what sets Coco apart is her
modernizing changes to the fashion of the day — literally
liberating women from their corsets — and the ways she can take
out a bit here, snip off a little there, and transform traditional into
progressive. Coco is a dress whisperer.
Coco Before Chanel is written and directed by Anne Fontaine,
an unknown to me but someone worth exploring the filmography of.
Fontaine infuses the film with an energy that is hard to pin down and
classify but evident from the first images (the movie begins with
burlap). It recalls the blood-veined vitality of Elizabeth and
the textured reality of Julie & Julia.
