'Coco Before Chanel" is a film as unfussy and elegant as the creations of the designer.
It's the candid and unsentimental story of Gabrielle "Coco" Chanel and how, at a time when women's opportunities were very much tied to men's wallets, a girl who grew up in an orphanage managed to become a 20th-century icon.
The film begins in that orphanage, where Chanel and her sister, Adrienne, are dropped off by their father, who doesn't look back and never returns. It quickly moves on to a grown-up Gabrielle (Audrey Tautou) and Adrienne (Marie Gillain), now bar singers, trying not to be mistaken for hookers.
Gabrielle, who gets the nickname Coco from a song the two sing, has a hard shell. Unlike her sister, she wants no part of romantic notions about love (or anything else for that matter). The best thing about love is the sex, she says, and it's a shame that you need a man for that.
Adrienne, however, has fallen for a baron and hopes to marry him. That baron's friend, Etienne Balsan (Benoit Poelvoorde), takes a liking to the prickly Coco and she, after some combative flirting, to him. So when Adrienne leaves to become the baron's side woman, Coco arrives unannounced at Balsan's estate.
Thus begins a complex relationship. It is loveless at first, and both leave unsaid what's going on, which is, of course, that Coco has become one of his latest mistresses. Indeed, after a few days, he sends her off, but with nowhere to go, Coco asks to stay. Balsan's appalling deal is that she stay upstairs, hidden from his high-society friends.
But even as she's being kept, Coco won't be a traditional kept woman; she won't even be grateful. She fully charges into Balsan's life, soon befriending an actress (Emmanuelle Devos) and attracting the attention of English businessman Boy Capel (Alessandro Nivola). It is with Capel that gets closest to true love.
The two relationships, with Capel and Balsan, are what's most interesting about the film. Nivola's Capel is soulful and gorgeous, and just when your mind goes to the typical movie romantic place, director Anne Fontaine firmly pulls you back to Earth. There'll be none of that. In some ways, the more honest relationship is the propositional one with Balsan, and Poelvoorde plays his role with a wonderful mix of sadness and selfishness and glee.
Tautou does well, too. Her gamin prettiness works here as an oppositional force; she's not playing cute. With her ever-present cigarette and air of disdain, her Coco isn't always likable, but she's worthy of respect.
While the film doesn't, in depth, explore Chanel's journey as a designer, we do see it develop. She's a seamstress all along and we see her hatred of the corsets that bind women of that era. There's a hint that the nuns of the orphanage inspired her simple collars. She transforms men's garments into outfits and after a trip to the sea falls for fisherman's shirts. We see her order up a little black dress (the first?) and become a famed milliner. And there's a lovely sequence at the end where she puts together her couture line. Her caress of fabric is nearly palpable.
But really this is a simple story about an ambitious woman finding a place among men, and then surpassing them. And yes, like a Chanel suit, it's a classic.
