Coco Chanel and Igor Stravinsky
Jan Kauner (2009)
Like Coco Before Chanel, the title gets full marks for accuracy, although it’s hardly snappy. The film is about the affair between Chanel and Stravinsky which is supposed to have taken place in 1920, when Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes had camped in Paris after the Russian Revolution and Chanel – a fan of the company’s work and who appears to have helped finance some of their main productions – invited Stravinsky, his wife and family to stay in her house on the outskirts of the capital, where he would have peace and quiet in which to compose. Jan Kauner’s movie is more enjoyable than Coco Before Chanel thanks to the visuals – the decoration and design of, as well as the clothes, rooms and furniture in Chanel’s beautiful home; the rich colouring of the cinematography (by David Ungaro). But the movie is still not up to much: for the most part, Coco and Igor (its name for the forthcoming US release) is a good bad example of a film-maker convincing himself, and maybe others, that if he takes things slowly and deliberately enough he will create a work of art. The screenplay by Chris Greenhalgh is based on his 2002 ‘novel’ of the same name although it’s hard to see, from the evidence of what’s on screen, how a verbal rendering of the story could amount to enough prose for a novel.
Coco and Igor is essentially a shallow and lamely familiar biopic. That’s signalled in the protracted description of the first performance of ‘The Rite of Spring‘ in Paris in 1913, with which the film opens. We see and hear the audience’s notorious reactions, watch the largely unchanging faces of Stravinsky and Nijinsky and Chanel but get no real sense of what a challenge the uproar in the auditorium must have presented to the dancers, already trying to master unusual choreography. Later on, when Chanel and Stravinsky eventually have sex, Kauner cuts to a sunny glade and ‘Rite’ on the soundtrack. (Gabriel Yared has written a rather skilful score for the film, incorporating ‘Rite’ details.) In a big row between Stravinsky and his ailing wife Catherine about what’s going on between him and Chanel, Catherine, like so many wronged movie wives before her, opens with, ‘I don’t know what to think – I don’t seem to know you any more’.
While Stravinsky is composing, Chanel is in search of a new perfume. There’s an odd moment when she visits the place where it’s being developed and the scientist who greets her there does a sort of twirl in his lab coat, as if auditioning for work in the other side of Chanel’s business. Imperious and decisive, she tries and rejects many scents, narrowing the choice down to two. She is then reminded by the lab coat that it must be one or the other. She chooses. He looks at the identifying label on the phial and mutters, ‘numéro cinq’. (This elicited an ‘ah-ha …!’ in the audience at the Richmond Filmhouse.) We seem to be meant to appreciate the dual irony that we have Igor Stravinsky to thank for Chanel Number 5 and Coco Chanel for whatever music Stravinsky was writing at the time. (Because this is unspecified, the rhyming doesn’t quite match – the music seems second best to the perfume. You feel Jan Kauner and Chris Greenhalgh are a bit frustrated that it wasn’t ‘The Rite of Spring’ that emerged during Stravinsky’s months chez Chanel.) There is a super-banal moment at the end when someone – whether Stravinsky or Chanel or just the director I wasn’t sure – imagines a production of ‘The Rite’ with Coco as the ritual victim.
As Chanel, Anna Muglalis (Juliette Gréco in Gainsbourg) is undeniably striking – but worrying: she’s like a Modiglianised female impersonator doing Ava Gardner. It seems to take forever for her to speak – when she finally does, the deep notes of her voice are both surprising and unsurprising. Muglalis has a look that’s immediately compelling but it’s just the one look. When she’s not prowling around like an old-Hollywood predatory lesbian, she has a catwalk walk (she has been a model and indeed has advertised Chanel). Muglalis is acceptable as a representation of the iconic nature of the woman she’s incarnating – that is, she illustrates how Chanel may be seen in the popular imagination. It’s typical of the canny superficiality of the piece that Mads Mikkelsen, who plays Stravinsky, doesn’t either resemble the real thing or a popular idea of the real thing. Mikkelsen is more conventionally good-looking than either (I would guess that the minds of most people who’ve seen photographs of Stravinsky tend to hold in the memory an exaggerated idea of the oddness of his appearance). Mikkelsen occasionally suggests a beefier Ed Harris but, more often and weirdly, Christopher Walken – after a very long time doing weights. Although his performance is unexciting, Mikkelsen does good things fiddling with his spectacles (so that they seem an essential part of Stravinsky’s concealment of a powerfully libidinous nature); and the rough tones of his Russian-French (Mikkelsen is Danish) sometimes give the poor lines he has to speak some texture and tension.
As the tubercular Catherine Stravinsky, Elena Morozova has a startling pthisic pallor and is very good at conveying a deep fear of losing her husband, either because TB will kill her or Chanel will steal him. Catherine informs Igor at one stage that Chanel merely ‘collects things’ – and this seemed to me more credible than the sentimental conclusion to the film, which tries to suggest that both Coco and Igor, in old age, remembered each other as the love of their life. (I’m prepared to believe the allegedly Nazi-oriented Chanel was always a nasty piece of work but, to be fair, wasn’t Arthur ‘Boy’ Capel, who died in 1919, supposed to be her one true love?) The many Stravinsky children don’t register very strongly, although the girls are better than the boys. It’s usually a safe bet that if a director has to keep showing a child in a swing it’s because there’s a shortage of other things to show, and so it proves here.
8 August 2010