The recent advertising campaign for Chanel perfumes features close-ups of the French actress, Audrey Tatou and it is no coincidence that this actress portrays the fashion icon, Coco Chanel in the new film Coco Before Chanel.
Coco is a Popular Role
Tatou is not the first actress to portray Chanel. Audrey Hepburn played the part in the Andre Previn, Alan Jay Lerner Broadway musical Coco in 1969. Then Timothy Dalton (AKA James Bond) played Coco’s French lover in the 1981 bomb, Chanel Solitaire,”and Shirley MacLaine played a seventy-year-old Coco last summer in a TV movie called Coco Chanel, But this year alone, there are four movies being made about Coco—the one with Audrey Tatou, another focusing on the designer’s affair with Russian composer Igor Stravinsky, and two other projects—one with Cousine Cousine director Daniele Thompson, and one with former Disney star, Demi Lovato.
She Was a Poor Orphan Girl...
Coco Before Chanel”is much more than just a biopic. It recreates the patriarchal France that we know from Colette’s Gigi in much more realistic terms. Young Coco has none of the required background to become a success in turn-of-the century Paris, so to pay the bills, Coco and her sister perform songs each evening at a provincial cabaret, and work as seamstresses in a dress shop by day. The sister breaks up the act to chase after a Count, who promises to marry her, and then Coco gets fired from the cabaret when she refuse to entertain the customers “in private.” Left to her own devices, Coco shows up baggage-in-hand at the estate of a very wealthy racehorse owner/trainer Etienne Balsan (Benoit Poelvoorde) who had bought the sisters champagne at the cabaret. Etienne immediately banishes Coco to one of the small bedrooms in his mansion with the command to “stay quiet and out of sight.” Undaunted, Coco whips out her trusty sewing kit and transforms her old dresses, and his shirts, ties and trousers, into comfortable and well-styled clothing which catch the eye of the corseted, feathered and bejeweled women who attend the infamous Balsan parties and horse races.
One of the guests is a self-made British businessman named Boy Capel (Alessandro Nivola) who first flirts with Coco and then falls for her. Asking Etienne’s permission, Boy whisks Coco off to a weekend by the sea and she falls in love for the first time.
Critics Disagree
Although others have written that the movie’s greatest strength lies in Tatou’s performance as a strong-willed, and very talented woman, or how director Anne Fontaine lets us watch as Coco is inspired to create her revolutionary designs, I think the one to watch is Benoit Poelvoorde. This fine Belgian actor manages to convey a sense of worldly-wise disdain, disbelief, and eventually love for the infuriating, exasperating and often quite sullen woman who moves into his house. Having sent her off with a younger rival with his encouragements, he finds, like Henry Higgins in My Fair Lady that he has “grown accustomed” to Coco. So much so, that he even proposes marriage.
Coco’s reply is simple: “I will never marry.”
The film has been needlessly criticized for not showing how Chanel was used as propaganda by the Germans when they took over Paris, or how she had a Nazi General as a lover or how she was publicly anti-Semitic during this time. But those criticisms seem to forget that the film stops a decade before the invasion.
Instead, they should spend time praising the artistry of the last few minutes. In a shot down a mirrored staircase that should linger in the audience’s mind, we see models parading past Coco as she gives them last minute approval before they unveil her new dress designs to the world. Then, while flashbulbs pop and an applause begins onscreen, the models turn and applaud Coco, who remains seated on the stairs where suddenly, and for the first time in the film, she breaks into a joyous smile.
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