Coco Avant Chanel belongs to a small movie subgenre of biopics that restrict themselves to their subjects’ early years, before they did all the things that made them famous. And so, just as Backbeat told us about the early days of The Beatles when they were still playing shows in Germany and The Motorcycle Diaries told us about the youthful adventures of Che Guevara, Coco Avant Chanel tells us the story of fashion icon Coco Chanel — and ends just as she’s opening up her first successful hat store in Paris.
After a brief prologue showing Chanel’s dreary childhood growing up in an orphanage, we meet her as a young woman (now played by Audrey Tautou), scraping out a career as a nightclub singer with her sister Adrienne (Marie Gillain). Already, there’s a striking contrast between Chanel’s dour personality and this frivolous career — she wants to be a success, but refuses to seduce or flirt with men in order to achieve it, and that tension between her independent spirit and her unavoidable dependence on male financial support will play out throughout Chanel’s early life.
For instance, she soon attracts the attention of wealthy industrialist Êtienne Balsan (Benoît Poelvoorde) and cajoles him into allowing her to live in his country house. She lives there as his sometime lover, required, humiliatingly, to eat with the servants and stay out of sight from his “proper” guests. But her strikingly modern sense of style — simple, comfortable clothes, free of unnecessary adornments, set off by masculine cuffs, collars, jackets and blazers — soon catches their attention anyway. Although it takes a while for Chanel to become interested in fashion as a career, it’s clear that her philosophy of style, not her way with a cabaret song, was always her great creative gift.
An exemplar of female independence who lived for years as a wealthy man’s “kept woman”; a practical, sensible thinker who thrived in one of the world’s most superficial industries — Coco Chanel was a woman full of fascinating contradictions and Audrey Tautou sets aside all of her abundant gamine charms to reflect Chanel’s often prickly personality.
But Coco Avant Chanel is much less successful than its subject at breaking with tradition; despite its unusual decision to cut off its story early, it still doesn’t amount to much more than another well-made, handsome-looking, slightly dull biopic tailor-made for awards season. One big problem is that the romance between Chanel and her lover Boy Capel (Alessandro Nivola) — whose sudden death in a car crash was the tragedy of Chanel’s life — never gets hotter than a low simmer. As movies about pioneering women go, Coco Avant Chanel is better than Amelia, but as Audrey Tautou vehicles go, I still prefer Amélie.
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