Her name is synonymous with style. Disdaining corsets and frilly ornamentation, Coco Chanel’s look was perfectly suited to the liberated flapper era, yet she maintained her position at the pinnacle of the fashion world until her death in 1971. However, it’s Chanel’s early years that fascinated director Anne Fontaine, who focuses on the rags portion of her rags-to-riches story in “Coco Before Chanel.”
Throughout the film, Fontaine clearly implies the pain of being orphaned as the greatest formative experience of Chanel’s life, fueling her drive to succeed and shaping her relationships with men.
When the audience first meets the Chanel sisters, they are performing songs in a rowdy nightclub, where they are expected to shill champagne in between numbers. Actually, neither is much of a vocal stylist, but Coco is a wizard with needle and thread. When it becomes clear they have no future in cabaret, both sisters become secret lovers of ostensibly upstanding society gentlemen. Though she chafes at the expectations of her new position in life, Chanel has yet to become the future paragon of independence. Essentially, "Before" could have been titled “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Kept Woman.”
Audrey Tautou plays Chanel as part Audrey Hepburn and part Elaine Stritch. Frankly, the Stritch half is more fun. At times, her peevish appeal to her wealthy lovers seems a bit obscure. Still, Benoît Poelvoorde becomes convincingly captivated by her, finding unexpected depth and humanity as her initially lecherous lover-keeper, Etienne Balsan.
With the carefully worded credit line, “Freely adapted from the book by Edmonde Charles-Roux,” “Before” seems to roughly conform to Chanel’s biography. Fontaine and her co-screenwriters only take Chanel up to her first big triumph as a designer, so those hoping for high fashion intrigue should look elsewhere (perhaps the 1981 biographical melodrama “Chanel Solitaire” starring Timothy Dalton and Rutger Hauer). Likewise, “Before” completely avoids Chanel’s controversial activities during World War II.
Though scandalous things happen during the time of the film, they are largely unseen and rarely spoken of directly. In fact, “Before” is a conventionally respectable prestige picture, but it’s unlikely to be a player during awards season or to factor on many critics’ top ten lists. While certainly a good fix for Francophiles, most viewers will simply find it a modestly pleasant diversion.
2.5 / 5
Joe Bendel blogs on jazz and cultural issues at http://jbspins.blogspot.com and coordinated the Jazz Foundation of America's instrument donation campaign for musicians displaced by Hurricane Katrina.
