Time for Audrey Tautou to generate some heat?
Coco Before Chanel
2009, 105 mins.
* * * (of five)
In French, with subtitles
Audrey Tautou won our hearts in Amelie in 2001 and we’ve been begging for her to do it again. We’re still waiting. Coco Before Chanel¸ a liberty-taking biopic of the famed glamour designer is not a bad film, but neither is it a dazzling one.
As the title suggests, it tracks Chanel to the cusp of fame and ends with a runway coda in which the elegant Chanel is being lionized. The film takes up Chanel (1895-1971) at age twelve, when she and her elder sister were tucked into a Catholic Church orphanage because their recently widowed father had to travel to find work. On the screen, Chanel leaves the nuns at age eighteen to pursue a cabaret career. There she meets and becomes the mistress of the rich, fun-seeking, but vacuous Étienne Balsan and moves to his country estate. This is our first tipoff that director Anne Fontaine is searching for a spark; in real life Chanel apprenticed with a tailor when she turned eighteen and met Balsan in the shop.
Benoît Poelvoorde plays Balsan and is easily the best thing in the film. Balsan isn’t clever and he knows it. He lives the life of the idle gentry and knows his way around horses and barns much better than around independent women or society. This is the sort of role that invites overacting in British films, but Poelvoorde strikes precisely the right balance between being clueless, well-intentioned, and vulnerable. When Coco ultimately and inevitably leaves him for the dashing and more intellectual Arthur Capel (Alessandro Nivola), we appropriately cannot tell if Balsan will muddle on or fall to pieces.
Once again Fontaine reaches into a grab bag of histrionics to advance the action artificially. Capel did indeed underwrite Chanel’s business ventures, become her lover, and die in a car crash but what takes place in an instant in the film took ten years in life. Why take such liberties with Edmonde Charles-Roux’s biography? This is Fontaine’s eleventh film as a director, none of which have set the world afire. Her track record and predictable story arc and camera work in Coco suggest she simply isn’t a very imaginative director.
Alas, the other thing weighing down the film is Tautou. After Amelie, Tautou was hailed as the French Audrey Hepburn, an ingénue destined to make us love her time and time again. This has not happened. Her work since Amelie has been uneven and includes one dreadful performance (Sophie Neveu in The DaVinci Code). In most of her films, including Coco, Tautou has been perfectly competent, but little more. The experience of watching her is akin to hoping that a smoldering fire will blaze, but it never does. The tacked-on cabaret sequences are there to capture an Amelie-like insouciance, but they simply don’t.
Let me reiterate—Coco Before Chanel is not a bad film, and one could certainly drop ten bucks on far worse. One does come away with a real understanding of what made Chanel revolutionary. She was a defiant champion of simple elegance in the waning days of frippery and excess, and an independent woman in the days in which Victorian wallflowers gave way to the New Woman. Coco is often fun to watch and Fontaine does a reasonably decent job of showing how Chanel created style from the rawest of materials. The film also invites us to compare the graceful standards Chanel established with the egocentric and trashy lines that purport to be haute couture these days. Chanel once remarked that “In order to be irreplaceable one must always be different.” This, ultimately, is the biggest problem with Coco Before Chanel-- it’s relentlessly ordinary.--LV
2009, 105 mins.
* * * (of five)
In French, with subtitles
Audrey Tautou won our hearts in Amelie in 2001 and we’ve been begging for her to do it again. We’re still waiting. Coco Before Chanel¸ a liberty-taking biopic of the famed glamour designer is not a bad film, but neither is it a dazzling one.
As the title suggests, it tracks Chanel to the cusp of fame and ends with a runway coda in which the elegant Chanel is being lionized. The film takes up Chanel (1895-1971) at age twelve, when she and her elder sister were tucked into a Catholic Church orphanage because their recently widowed father had to travel to find work. On the screen, Chanel leaves the nuns at age eighteen to pursue a cabaret career. There she meets and becomes the mistress of the rich, fun-seeking, but vacuous Étienne Balsan and moves to his country estate. This is our first tipoff that director Anne Fontaine is searching for a spark; in real life Chanel apprenticed with a tailor when she turned eighteen and met Balsan in the shop.
Benoît Poelvoorde plays Balsan and is easily the best thing in the film. Balsan isn’t clever and he knows it. He lives the life of the idle gentry and knows his way around horses and barns much better than around independent women or society. This is the sort of role that invites overacting in British films, but Poelvoorde strikes precisely the right balance between being clueless, well-intentioned, and vulnerable. When Coco ultimately and inevitably leaves him for the dashing and more intellectual Arthur Capel (Alessandro Nivola), we appropriately cannot tell if Balsan will muddle on or fall to pieces.
Once again Fontaine reaches into a grab bag of histrionics to advance the action artificially. Capel did indeed underwrite Chanel’s business ventures, become her lover, and die in a car crash but what takes place in an instant in the film took ten years in life. Why take such liberties with Edmonde Charles-Roux’s biography? This is Fontaine’s eleventh film as a director, none of which have set the world afire. Her track record and predictable story arc and camera work in Coco suggest she simply isn’t a very imaginative director.
Alas, the other thing weighing down the film is Tautou. After Amelie, Tautou was hailed as the French Audrey Hepburn, an ingénue destined to make us love her time and time again. This has not happened. Her work since Amelie has been uneven and includes one dreadful performance (Sophie Neveu in The DaVinci Code). In most of her films, including Coco, Tautou has been perfectly competent, but little more. The experience of watching her is akin to hoping that a smoldering fire will blaze, but it never does. The tacked-on cabaret sequences are there to capture an Amelie-like insouciance, but they simply don’t.
Let me reiterate—Coco Before Chanel is not a bad film, and one could certainly drop ten bucks on far worse. One does come away with a real understanding of what made Chanel revolutionary. She was a defiant champion of simple elegance in the waning days of frippery and excess, and an independent woman in the days in which Victorian wallflowers gave way to the New Woman. Coco is often fun to watch and Fontaine does a reasonably decent job of showing how Chanel created style from the rawest of materials. The film also invites us to compare the graceful standards Chanel established with the egocentric and trashy lines that purport to be haute couture these days. Chanel once remarked that “In order to be irreplaceable one must always be different.” This, ultimately, is the biggest problem with Coco Before Chanel-- it’s relentlessly ordinary.--LV
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