> Coco avant Chanel
Director: Anne Fontaine
Cast: Audrey Tautou, Benoit Poelvoorde, Alessandra Nivola, Marie Gillain, Emmanuelle Devos
Rating: (PG)
2 stars (out of 5)
Reviewed by Christine Powley
When it comes to biopics it pays to know little about the subject. Coco avant Chanel (Rialto) begins well. Coco Chanel was a notoriously tough broad and, starting at the beginning, let us understand why.
A poor orphan girl scrambling for advantage, she openly proclaims that love is for idiots.
The audacity of her behaviour is astonishing but it rings true.
She finds a wealthy, good-natured man, Etienne Balsan (Benoit Poelvoorde), and inveigles herself into his life.
So she gains the comfort she dreamed of, but is bored. Then sexy Arthur "Boy" Capel (Alessandro Nivola) turns up and she falls in love, but Capel is about to marry a frigid Englishwoman.
He gives her the money to open a hat shop.
They continue their love affair but can they ever really be together? So, in two languid hours this film has turned the most important woman in the history of fashion into a dizzy, lovesick fool.
It might wash if you know nothing about her but the name.
However, it is ultimately frustrating because the real story is so much juicier.
Chanel might have loved Boy best, but she did not pine. She got on with it, taking plenty of more useful lovers after him.
The movie I want to see about Chanel is set in World War 2, when she lived in the Ritz with a Nazi general.
That one will never get made, because there are no perfume sales in it.
Best thing: Audrey Tautou puts plenty of vinegar into her performance. In the end the script defeats her but she goes down fighting.
Worst thing: Turning Chanel into the sort of woman who devotes herself to her art because she has lost her one true love is an insult to her memory.
See it with: A great dollop of disbelief.
