Coco Before Chanel

Coco Before Chanel, with Audrey Tautou in the lead role.

Director: Anne Fontaine
Writers: Edmonde Charles-Roux (book)
Anne Fontaine
Costumes: Eudald Magri
Gabrielle 'Coco' Chanel: Audrey Tautou
Étienne Balsan: Benoît Poelvoorde
Arthur 'Boy' Capel: Alessandro Nivola

Length: 105 Minutes
Language: French (with English subtitles)

When I saw Audrey Tautou in the film version of Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code, I was singularly unimpressed. After seeing her in the lead role in Coco Before Chanel, I wonder if Code was just a bad film with a bad part for such a talented performer. In Chanel Tautou is in every scene, and you leave the film still feeling you did not get quite enough of her.

The rags-to-riches tale of the early life of Gabrielle "Coco" Chanel has a thoughtful subtext about how those of us not born into a life we want, are sometimes lucky enough to invent for ourselves a life we need.

And so it was for Chanel, an orphan who had a genius for seeing the world in a unique way, and who used her vision to rise above a life in which beautiful-but-poor women were handed from man to man, used as objects and discarded.

She chose that it would not happen to her. Living in a world on the edge of poverty, she used others to achieve the thing she wanted most--her independence. Unable to compete with the wealthy women of fashion around her, she chose to create a style of her own. If you are a woman, you know how much courage this requires. Women who do it often find themselves laughed at--and then, if they are lucky, find themselves imitated. And this is what happened to Chanel.

Chanel with the English lover, Alfred "Boy" Capel, from whom she borrowed the tweeds for some of her signiture suits. Here she wears a simple evening gown she designed that shocked Deauville, a city easily shocked back in the early 20th century.

Along the way she had help from men, at least one of whom she did not love, and one whom she did.

And along the way she had her heart broken, as most of us do. But like a character in a Hemingway novel, she survived and found herself stronger in the broken places. From love and loss she gained the strength to move on and to become the incredible success she later became.

Everything about this film is beautiful: the colors, the cinematography, the locations in the French countryside, the costumes, the fabrics, the lighting. Everything looks elongated, like a fashion sketch, and Tautou's eyes take it all in and give little away.

If you are an English speaking person turned off by French films, count this film as an unusual one, and one you would like anyway. There is very little dialogue, so the need for subtitles is limited. Chanel, for all her French pomposity, is a character an American can very much understand. If you had arrived with Allied forces to liberate Paris, you might have wished to march up to her shop and say "Chanel, we are here." Of course, as history would tell us, you might likely have found her in the arms of her Nazi officer lover ("collaboration horizontale" ). But she was always a practical woman.

When life gives you country linen and cotton instead of silk, there are those who can make linen and cotton the fashion. When the chic discard their frou frou for your plain straw boater, you have won a victory, as did Coco Chanel. She taught us a great deal about beauty and even more about the toughness needed in good fabric if it is to survive over time.

Audrey Tautou even makes a simple fisherman's shirt look fashionable in Coco Before Chanel.

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