Rating: **I can’t say I’m really a fashion connoisseur. In fact, I can’t even spell connoisseur, I just had spell check do it for me. So what’s the appeal in seeing a movie called Coco avant Chanel? A fetish for reading subtitles? Possibly, but more pertinently is that fact that regardless the capacity of your frame of reference in regards to fashion, Chanel didn’t just design clothes, she changed the culture. Named one of Time magazine’s most influential people of the 20th century, Chanel helped usher in a new day in women’s fashion. It was a day where women were free of corsets and bloomers and able to be elegant in simpler, more masculine-inspired fashions. Which is probably why it’s a good thing that she gave up on the notion of seeking fame through a singing career.
The film opens with the young Coco, whose birth name was really Gabrielle, working by day as a seamstress in a tailor’s shop and singing at night on stage at a local club. Working side-by-side with her sister Adrienne (Marie Gillain), the Chanel sisters have big ambitions about singing to bigger audiences in fancier venues, and if all else fails, they can take up acting in motion pictures. After her sister marries an aristocrat, Coco becomes mistress to Baron Balsan (Benoît Poelvoorde). But wanting to be more than some rich guy’s silent girlfriend, Coco begins designing hats, which slowly become the rage with the French upper crust. Of course, there are romantic complications. Enter Arthur 'Boy' Capel, a British playboy and polo player that would go on to be Chanel’s first financier, and the man that broke her heart.
I have to say that this movie left me torn. On the one hand, the film delivers what it promises by meticulously following Chanel’s life before she was the trend setting fashion designer. On the other hand though, one couldn’t help but feel a disconnect between the two parts of Chanel, the struggling singer/actress/mistress/aspiring designer and the legend she would end up becoming. What exactly drove Chanel to become the biggest female designer of her time, if not all time, and how did the experiences related in the movie inform her mould-breaking fashion ideas? These are questions that never got answered in my opinion. True, this is Coco BEFORE Chanel, but she was still Chanel. The way the ending leaves you, a proud and accomplished Coco having achieved enormous success, made the rest of the film feel like an extended Family Guy cut away gag. This is even more boring than when Coco Chanel bummed around her boyfriend’s house for years, they might remark.
Not helping things was Audrey Tatou’s wooden, almost bored performance in the title role. I mean, it’s obvious that being moody and pissy is part of the character’s inner struggle as she tries to become the woman of class and success that she always wanted to be rather than being stuck in the seen and not heard role of the mistress. But there’s only so many times Tatou can grind her teeth or slam a door and still make it real. Overall, I’d have to characterize the performances, on the whole, as clinical and without any life to them. Not a single actor stood out and made me say, now that’s a good performance. Rather everybody just seemed to be going through the motions.
Between the rather meandering story and the wooden acting, one leaves the theatre with a sense of why did I just pay good money to see that. Certainly the film was well made from a technical standpoint, and there were some interesting story possibilities to be true. Instead, it just seemed as if screenwriter and director Anne Fontaine had decided to expand upon the bits that were the dullest of Chanel’s life without going into any real detail about her process, methodology or creativity as an emerging fashion designer. Plus, Chanel’s life got so much more interesting after she became famous, with probably enough material in there for two movies. The Chanel Trilogy? Perhaps.
