Audrey Tatou is perfect as the gamin who was Gabrielle Chanel before she became Coco, perhaps the ultimate French designer-heroine, the woman who made the Little Black Dress as the perfect and necessary garment for every woman's closet.
"Coco Before Chanel" is Anne Fontaine's homage to Chanel, a look at her early years, from the French orphanage in which she grew up to the Paris cabarets where she became Coco, to the beautiful country homes of England where she learned vital lessons about life, to the workrooms and salons of Paris where she metamorphosed into Chanel, couturier to both mass and class.
The Chanel sisters, Gabrielle and Adrienne (Marie Gillain) are children when their father leaves them at an orphanage, and from then on their lives are driven by a desire for respectability, at least by the standards of the time, and for success. Gabrielle, with an eye for sewing and for clothes, points made a little too obviously by director Fontaine, first finds success as a cabaret singer, with double entendres in a song about a dog named Coco bringing her the nickname that stayed with her for a lifetime.
Poor girls, then more than now, needed help in finding an upwards path, and for some, an "arrangement" of sorts, was the easiest way to go. Coco, battling for her virtue in a series of sleazy saloons, found the road in Etienne Balsan, a superb performance by Benoit Poelvoorde. He was slightly taken aback when she arrived at his estate, ready to be a live-in mistress. Balsan often was cruel, as in insisting she eat with the servants in the kitchen while he dined with his friends in the dining room, but he taught her many things, most of which she used to get ahead.
One was in introducing her to "Boy" Capel (Alessandro Nivola), who treated her differently while offering similar, and excellent, guidance.
Fontaine's direction is smooth, and the models, the gowns and certainly Tatou, all look gorgeous. The screenplay, however, involved both Anne and her sister, Camille, along with Christopher Hampton and Jacques Fieschi, in adapting a book by Edmonde Charles-Roux. The seams show in a way that Chanel never would have permitted, but the movie looks lovely.
At the Plaza Frontenac
–Joe