Film review: Coco before Chanel

Published on Thursday 30 July 2009 19:12

COCO BEFORE CHANEL (12A) ** DIRECTED BY: ANNE FONTAINE STARRING: AUDREY TAUTOU, ALESSANDRO NIVOLA, EMMANUELLE DEVOS

PROVING that even French fashion magnates are not immune to the kind of laborious origins movies so beloved of comic book fans and sci-fi nerds, Gabrielle "Coco" Chanel has her initial rise-to-the-top pored over in tedious detail in a film that ends long before getting to any of the really fascinating aspects of her life. As the title of Anne Fontaine's picture-pretty but otherwise dreary biopic indicates, Coco Before Chanel focuses exclusively on her early years, tracing her journey from poverty-stricken orphan to rising star in the fashion world.

Kicking off in 1893, the film begins with the ten-year-old Gabrielle being deposited by her father in an orphanage along with her sister Adrienne after their mother's death, but it soon leaps forward 15 years to find Gabrielle (played by Audrey Tautou, who looks the part, but doesn't have enough edge to truly convince) living in squalor amid the bright lights of Paris as she unsuccessfully attempts to earn a living as a cabaret singer while making ends meet as a seamstress. Though she doesn't have the necessary vocal talents to make it to the big time, she does earn the nickname Coco and comes to the attention of rich playboy, Etienne Balsan (Benot Poelvoorde) who allows her to stay at his country estate when the singing doesn't pan out.

Thenceforth the film devotes the majority of its running time to showing how Coco fought against convention. We see how she disliked the notion of being a kept woman and strove to earn her own money. We see how she railed against the impracticality of women's clothing by adapting Balsan's clothes into the elegantly simple cuts that would later come to define her style. Mostly, though, we see how she fell desperately in love with Arthur "Boy" Capel (Alessandro Nivola), a British industrialist who would go on to break her heart several times. Yes, as much as the film pretends to be a tribute to Coco's status as a fiercely independent woman in a pre-feminist world, someone driven to create the world conquering fashion empire we know today, Fontaine ironically adheres to biopic convention by allowing the commercial appeal of romance and all its attendant melodrama to win out over exploring in any meaningful way the real reasons for Coco's success.

As the film has it, it was the romantic travesties that she endured that would eventually give her the impetus to create her world-conquering fashion house, but we have to take this on faith since the cursory attempts to show her developing her talents succumb to the usual reductive biopic flashpoint moments (it's never quite as bad as the "Ring of Fire" moment from the Johnny Cash biopic Walk the Line, but it's not far off). The biggest problem, though, is that Fontaine simply doesn't transform the material of Coco's early life into anything particularly eye-catching or attention-grabbing. Hitchcock once quipped that "drama is life with all the dull bits cut out", but Fontaine seems to be working from an opposite impulse. In the years after this film is set, Coco took up with a Nazi officer, was arrested on suspicion of war crimes, fled to Switzerland, rehabilitated her reputation and managed to consolidate her business empire into one of the most successful and recognisable brands in the world. It's quite a story, but what do the end titles tell us? That she never married. Maybe in this new age of franchise filmmaking they're saving all this apparently extraneous detail for a series of sequels. Chanel No 5 is surely too good a marketing opportunity to miss.