Team Coco or team Igor? This film might be better if one was a vampire.

Ostensibly, the clandestine affair between Coco Chanel and Igor Stravinski should be compelling cinema. As two of the 20th century’s most internationally-recognized cultural icons — one, who changed the face of fashion, the other, one of the century’s greatest composers — either would be enough to carry a film alone. Heck, Coco Avant Chanel certainly thought so.

In truth, having two characters bottle their emotions in favour of expressing themselves through their art, as they do in Coco Chanel and Igor Stravinsky, turns this period romance into a bone-dry exercise in tepid longing and near-silent lovemaking.

The film’s strongest moments occur in its first 20 minutes, when Chanel (Anna Mouglais) is introduced to the radical musical ideas of Stravinsky (Mads Mikkelsen), whose ballet, The Rite of Spring,, is so avant that it literally starts a riot in a Paris theatre. As the music swells, the camera elegantly glides from the wings of the stage to the audience and back again; writer-director Jan Kounen is able to imbue the scene with requisite gravity. This performance is akin to watching The Beatles in Germany or Elvis on Ed Sullivan — it’s game-changing and epic.

But when The Rite gets a critical drubbing, Stravinski is ruined. But Chanel is intrigued.

Then, it flashes forward seven years. Chanel, frustrated with the corsetry of the late 1800s, has rewritten the book on fashion, and now she’s successful enough to play benefactor to the now-struggling Stravinsky. He retires, with his family, to Chanel’s estate in the French countryside, and it doesn’t take long before Coco has taken hold of this composer’s baton.

Stravinsky’s slowly-dying wife is smart enough to know what is going on. What ensues is a lover’s triangle with enough furtive glances to rival any installment in the Twilight saga.

But Kounen’s entry to the artist-as-bastard genre does offer something that others don’t — it offers up two libido-driven egotists instead of one. Usually films of this ilk are content to have one musician-painter-writer fool around on his wife without care — not so for Coco Chanel and Igor Stravinsky.

In that sense, it’s intriguing to watch Mouglais break down the gender wall and play Chanel with all the characteristics usually associated with a man. She is hard-nosed in business, a sexual predator and seems unwilling to think of anyone but herself; this behaviour only sustains the film so long. Ultimately, both characters are so self-serving that it’s hard to care for either of them.

And it certainly doesn’t help that both actors muster more emotion in scenes where they’re listening to Stravinsky’s music than they do in their romantic relations. Maybe that’s the point, though. These two are such tortured artists that they could never be happy no matter who they’re with. Be that as it may, it doesn’t make Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky worth watching.