Article published November 06, 2009
Movie review: Coco Before Chanel ****
Tautou sheds whimsy in biopic about French fashion’s liberator
By MICK LASALLE
SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE
Though Amelie established her in America as a whimsical zany, Audrey Tautou’s essence as an actress has always had much more to do with melancholy, a kind of systemic sadness borne of an innate capacity for unvarnished observation. Tautou’s dark eyes always seem to see the truth of things, and in Coco Before Chanel she finds her ideal role, playing a woman whose direct gaze took in and understood everything — from the desperation of her own situation to the ridiculousness of women’s styles at the turn of the 20th century.
Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel is already a tough cookie when we meet her, working as a singing waitress in a cabaret (the song “Coco” is her specialty) and living in an orphanage with her sister Adrienne (Marie Gillain). Though adversity seems to have taught the sister to trust people and wish for the best, Coco has derived another lesson entirely — that she’s on her own, and that weakness is death.
Coco Chanel is not the most lovable of heroines, but it’s a strength of the film that director Anne Fontaine allows Tautou to make Coco as cold and ungiving as she does. As Adrienne, Marie Gillain provides the movie warmth, though it’s understood that Adrienne is a dreamer and that Coco knows the score. The early 20th century is a maze of traps for women, especially for those born poor: prostitution, destitution, factory labor. Coco is hard because any sentimentality could lead to disaster.
Through relentless self-assertion, Coco becomes the occasional lover and house guest of Etienne, a rich playboy, played by Belgian actor Benoit Poelvoorde as a man enslaved by decadence. It’s a beautiful portrait of weakness and superficiality, combined with a residual decency and painful self-knowledge. It’s perhaps the best performance in the film. Alessandro Nivola plays the other man in Coco’s life, Boy Capel, a blithe English polo player who encourages Coco’s design ambitions.
Coco Before Chanel is essentially the portrait of an artist, and the film takes care to show the development of Chanel’s design vision. Long before she has started designing women’s apparel, she is shown walking among society women, marveling at the multiple layers of clothing and the constraining corsets that women accepted as their lot in life. The movie suggests that it’s Coco’s position on the outside of society that allowed her to see the situation with fresh eyes, and that what she devised — modern, simplified — was an essential part of women’s emancipation in the 20th century.
Fontaine and Tautou don’t pretend that emancipation is easy. Coco Before Chanel is inevitably a tale of triumph, but there are miles on Coco’s spirit by the time she comes into her destiny. Look for Tautou in the remarkable scene in which Coco’s watches her models wearing her designs. The focus is intense, that of someone who has concentrated everything she has and everything she is into this one act of self-creation.
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