Coco Before Chanel

Let me start off by saying I am a sucker for a good period piece. The lushly luxuriant costumes, the sumptuous scenery..I become rapturous at an Austen-era film aiming to educate me about the customs of times past. Emma Thompson's adaptation of Sense and Sensibility was luminous in the realization of its characters, making the average viewer want to actually read the novels everyone pretended to read in college. The writing was so on point, and the performances so true, that the viewer almost doesn't need the beautiful score or the gorgeous shots of the bucolic English countryside. Biopics are an even trickier type of period piece to master. The true details of one's life, lurid or not, have a tendency to feel like a book report on film. The decent ones (adequate script, excellent acting), like Ray and Walk the Line usually have something to rely on when the story begins to feel rote. In both of those cases, it is unequivocally the music.
Coco Before Chanel tackles the early life of Gabrielle "Coco" Chanel, before she became the international atelier of worldwide acclaim. Le petite gamine Audrey Tatou plays Chanel, and physically, she couldn't be any more the embodiment of "Mademoiselle" as Chanel was known. Tatou is feisty and determined, and owed us all a little character penance after the holocaust that was The Da Vinci Code. Alessandro Nivola plays Arthur "Boy" Capel, the rich self-made playboy responsible for financing Chanel's eponymous salon. Capel was Chanel's first and only true love, and he showed a belief in her talent as well as her unconventional looks. Admittedly, the chemistry between Tatou and Nivola is intoxicating. But anyone interested in the legacy of Mademoiselle will no doubt be familiar with the early period of her life, given the recent rash of Lifetime movies and sub-par fictionalized novels. Thus, when Coco Before Chanel veers towards typical biopic blather, one would assume that the clothes would be front and center. Not so. Director and screenwriter Anne Fontaine mistakenly makes Chanel's fabulous frippery a minor character in the film. Chanel's groundbreaking fabrics and tailoring should be used as a metaphor for Chanel herself; different, beautiful and a boon to women everywhere. Somehow, this film misses that crucial point.

My Comment has to do with the very constraints (both sartorial and otherwise) that Coco Chanel cast off, enabling her to be a truly modern woman. Women in our culture are often vilified for attempting to poach the richest and most powerful men. We are taught that our currency is our beauty and sexuality and men's currency is, well, currency. I've often wondered what would occur if the women who hunted rich men spent as much time trying to get rich on their own. Chanel is what occurs. Coco knew that she would never be well-born, or married to a titled aristocrat, so she simply chose to play a different game. Other than that pesky little Nazi incident, Coco's life was spectacular. I only wish I had tasted that flavor in the film.