Coco Before Chanel
PARIS — Spectacle, a love triangle, heritage settings, bravura acting, witty dialogue, a bittersweet finale: There’s something, so they say, for everyone in Anne Fontaine’s “Coco Before Chanel.”
There also is — not the least of the movie’s pleasures — the sense of a keen intelligence marshaling and shaping the material, shunning cliche and sentimentality and creating meaning out of what for once is not the standard biopic procedure of ticking off the boxes in a celebrity CV.
Fontaine’s focus is on Chanel’s formative years just before World War I, the transition from the modest, virtually peasant background of her childhood to the world of fashion and haute couture that she came to revolutionize. The young Gabrielle (Audrey Tautou), or Coco as she soon became known, meets and moves in with the wealthy racehorse owner Etienne Balsan (Benoit Poelvoorde), leading the life of a courtesan, resenting her dependence, keeping a tight rein on her emotions and all the time observing and learning from the elevated circles in which she finds herself.
According to Fontaine’s choice of Tautou for the part she was vehement in her selection, “Many could play the part, but you have to be different…She has to be really special and Audrey is very special [...] I had the conviction when I saw her that she was the reincarnation of a young Chanel.”
“Coco” is Fontaine’s first venture into costume drama, but her portrayal of a woman making her way in a perilous prefeminist world is wholly convincing. Alexandre Desplat’s score is tasteful and unobtrusive and the period detail impeccable. An enthralling trailer — see for yourself.
For more on Coco Chanel, see The Female Beau Brummel. Release date in US: September 25.
[...] rest is here: coco chanel « The Errant Æsthete Bookmark It Hide Sites $$('div.d647').each( function(e) { [...]
coco chanel « The Errant Æsthete | StyleBlog said this on 06/24/09 at 10:06:38 |