Audrey Tautou stars as Gabrielle Chanel, known as Coco, before she became famous.
LITTLE ROCK — Nobody wants to be Amelie forever. Not even Audrey Tautou, whose film career got vertical lift by portraying a wide-eyed gamine with a unique sense of justice in the 2001 French charmer. In Coco Before Chanel, Tautou picks up where she left off in 2002’s Dirty Pretty Things - where she’s cast as a Turkish Muslim working illegally as a hotel maid in a London the tourists don’t see - by taking viewers along a rougher route than sunny Amelie ever treads.
In Coco Before Chanel she shows grit as Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel, who, in 1893, along with her sister Adrienne (Marie Gillain), gets off to a rough start in life by being dumped at an orphanage by her father. Growing up tough and self-sufficient, she works at a raucous provincial saloon as a seamstress and singing waitress.
Not the least bit hesitant about sleeping her way to success, she takes up with a wealthy baron (Benoit Poelvoorde), an affair thatcracks open the door to the glamour of Paris. With the baron’s support, she has time to explore an interest in designing stylish hats. Then she becomes enamored of English industrialist/polo player Arthur “Boy” Capel (Alessandro Nivola). He encourages her to pursue her gift for creating simple, elegant clothing that transforms the corseted fashion industry and parallels the loosening of social and cultural restrictions on women in the early 1900s.
Brittle and bold, Coco’s appeal is rooted in her defiance. Anne Fontaine’s gorgeous period piece, which concludes around the time of World War I when Chanel is on the verge of becoming Chanel, is not about fashion. Nor is it about the other characters, who don’t get much ofa chance to develop personality or presence. It’s about how a woman uses fashion to free herself - and other women - from cultural constraints and forge a fabulous future. But that’s another story.
MovieStyle, Pages 42 on 11/06/2009
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