Dir.
Anne Fontaine, France, 2009, 110 mins, French with subtitles
Cast: Audrey Tautou, Benoit Poelvoorde, Alessandro Nivola
Review by
Carol Allen
A film about the life of a fashion icon has to look good and this one does. But this charming and entertaining costume biopic is not about Chanel's successful career but about Coco as a child and a young woman and the early life that made her the woman she became.
We first meet her as an little girl, abandoned by her father to the nuns in the orphanage, waiting for the visit from him that never comes. As a young woman, she's working as a seamstress and a cabaret singer in the 1908 equivalent of a clip joint, where she acquires the name Coco from one of the songs she sings and meets the rich playboy Balsan (Polevoorde), who later becomes her lover. When she loses her job, she inveigles her way into Balsan's beautiful château and his life and it is there she meets the love of her life, English businessman Arthur Capel, known to everyone as Boy (Nivola).
Tautou holds the centre of the film as the strong willed, independent and inventive Coco, who's learned to manipulate and use people, men in particular, in order to survive. Resistant to falling love and becoming emotionally dependent, she also constantly reinvents her past to suit the situation, much as she reinvents clothes to suit her own unique sense of style. Although in the orphanage sequences we get the impression of Coco as a solitary figure, we later learn she has a close relationship with Adrienne (Marie Gillain) her sister, a much gentler character. While Coco is determined to stay free, Adrienne yearns for marriage to the aristocratic lover she adores, which will never happen because of the social differences between them, while for similar reasons Balsan treats Coco as a private plaything, whom he keeps hidden from his friends, until he loses her to Boy and realises how much he loves her. Poelvoorde convinces as the charming and selfish Balsan and Nivola is very good indeed as Boy, showing us both his strengths, in that he is the one who accepts Coco just as she is, and his weaknesses - as a man not born into wealth, he puts marriage for money before his love for Coco. He also has the boyish charm indicated by his nickname.
What is particularly fascinating about the film is the way Coco's emerging talent is shown. She holds the elaborate dresses and hats of the time in contempt and develops her own idiosyncratic, boyishly simple style of dress, purloining Balsan's trousers, jacket and tie to make them something elegant all of her own and using Boy's dress style, such as his polo shirt, as an inspiration for her own creation. Tatou not only resembles the elfin looks of the late Audrey Hepburn in her heyday, but shares her talent for chic. It is though a touch frustrating, when Coco creates her first little black dress to go dancing in the casino with Boy at Deauville, that we never get a really good look at it.
Interestingly for the period, apart from the actress Emilienne (Emmanuelle Devos), who befriends her and commissions her iconic headgear, Coco's unusual mode of dress seems to cause comparatively little comment. The film takes some justifiable liberties with real life in terms of amalgamating characters, but apart from Balsan at one point mentioning the possibility of war coming, there is oddly no reference to World War One, even though it was an event, which had an enormous impact on that generation.
The story finishes with the now mature Chanel wearing the famous cardigan jacket and once more a solitary figure (she never married after the death of Boy in a car accident). She is at the centre of a lush fashion show of her creations. It's like a dream sequence out of time and a fitting final shot, which sums up the journey of this strong and essentially lonely woman.
|
