Coco Before Chanel

As I chase down the few remaining Oscar-nominated pictures that I missed in theaters, I come to Coco Before Chanel, which, as the title suggests, is a look at the early life of fashion designer Coco Chanel. As one would expect of a film about a fashion designer, the movie picked up a well-earned nomination for costume designer Catherine Leterrier.

Beyond the costumes, this film is a respectful, at times too-reverent examination of Chanel, who was dumped in an orphanage by her father, struggled to make it is as a singer, and then ended up revolutionizing women's style in pre-World War I France. But at the heart of it I found the film a little dull.

As anyone who has ever seen my wardrobe, I know nothing about fashion and have little interest in it. The film, directed by Anne Fontaine, does give the viewer a decent understanding of what made Chanel so revolutionary (she was the only fashion personality named in Time Magazine's Top 100 people of the century). In an era when women covered themselves with feathers and baubles to show their wealth, Chanel used the simplicity of men's fashion to stand out. Perhaps most importantly she did not wear a corset, which allowed women to have a measure of freedom, letting it all hang out.

But those things could be expressed in a documentary. This film is a narrative, and doesn't exactly crackle with drama. After a prologue in the orphanage, we pick her up as a singer in a saloon, where she meets a bumptious millionaire (Benoit Poelvoorde). She later shows up at his estate and kind of installs herself as a mistress. Later she falls in love with his friend, a British coal merchant (Alessandro Nivola) who encourages her individuality. Their relationship becomes complicated, though, and ends badly. That pretty much defines the conflict of the film.

Audrey Tatou is Chanel, and it is easy to see why the makers of the film would have abandoned the project without her participation. She looks a great deal like her subject and lifts the film out of its doldrums with an intense performance.

I read in the Wikipedia article on the film that there was some controversy about it because it did not address her collaboration with the Nazis. This is interesting, considering the film ends before the outbreak of World War I. Perhaps there are more movies to be made about this woman (indeed, there is one in the works about her relationship with Igor Stravinsky, who is not seen in this one).