Review: COCO BEFORE CHANEL

COCO BEFORE CHANEL is a well-made but very slow biopic about the early days of influential French fashion designer Coco Chanel. Though it has an excellent central performance by Audrey Tautou, it’s a flawed way to tell her story if it has any hope of appealing to a broad audience. Aspects of Coco Chanel’s life have been filmed before, notably CHANEL SOLITAIRE in 1981 with Marie France-Pisier as Coco and the 2008 TV movie COCO CHANEL starring Shirley Maclaine as an older Coco (who lived to be 83). This time director/writer Ann Fontaine shows us how Coco becomes Chanel, illustrating key events in the early life of an underprivileged young woman, with no resources other than her own ambition, who became such an important figure in forging contemporary tastes in style. The problem with the film (besides the fact that it’s French) is that, instead of the expected story of a passionate woman who could rip up fabric and turn it into a designer dress, COCO BEFORE CHANEL is about a woman caught in a love triangle between two colorless men. Her early years are the least interesting part of her life and the movie plays as a bland costume romance.

COCO BEFORE CHANEL begins with Chanel’s hardscrabble formative years soon before the first World War. The young and destitute Gabrielle (Audrey Tautou), or Coco as she became known, is seduced as a teen and moves in with the older but wealthy Etienne Balsan (Benoit Poelvoorde), an owner of race horses who doesn’t seem to do much except throw society parties. Leading the life of a kept woman, Coco begins to resent her dependence on Balsan, but keeps her emotions in check and learns class despite her own lack of breeding by observing members of the high society that she has found herself in. She makes friends with another of Balsan’s many mistresses, the actress Emilienne (Emmanuelle Devos), who encourages her to find her own calling. She then falls in love with Arthur “Boy” Capel (Alessandro Nivola), a handsome but stiff Brit who helps start her fashion business. There’s not much more to COCO BEFORE CHANEL, a mostly tedious movie about an interesting woman and her uninteresting friends and it’s unclear what we’re supposed to learn about her other than she could do amazing things with a needle and thread. Students of fashion will be disappointed as there are too few scenes showing how she was inspired to become such an icon in her field. She makes the occasional observation about the discomfort of corsets or the clumsiness of women’s hats, but mostly she’s shown attending parties, riding horses, or gazing longingly at Boy. The romantic passion between Coco and Boy is weak and it’s unclear whether she really loves him or is using him to advance her career.

The best thing about COCO BEFORE CHANEL is the photogenic Audrey Tautou whose character here is much less charming or eccentric than the title role in her 2001 breakthrough performance AMELIE. Bearing a strong resemblance to the real Coco, Tautou channels Chanel’s liberated approach to life and her determination to succeed while letting only hints of emotion get in her way. Tautou brings needed subtlety to a role that other actresses would have overplayed. By contrast, neither Poelvoorde or Nivola make much of an impression as her lovers. COCO BEFORE CHANEL is a good-looking film with great attention paid to elegant sets and period costume detail and I’m sure there’s a certain audience that will eat it up. The film’s final, wordless ten minute sequence shows an older Coco as the cool and successful high priestess of fashion that we all associate her with, smoking cigarettes as her art is paraded before her and it’s here that the film finally came to life for this reviewer. But it was too little too late and while COCO BEFORE CHANEL is a competent portrait of Chanel’s early life, it’s still a highbrow French artist bio and far from riveting viewing.