Monthly Archives: January 2016

  • Coco Before Chanel

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Coco avant Chanel

    Anne Fontaine (2009)

    The bland clarity of the storytelling is a relief after the narrative chaos of La vie en rose – the last French biopic to become an international hit – but that’s as much as can be said for Coco Before Chanel.  It’s what it says on the tin but this makes for a constipated story, continuously anticipatory and increasingly dull.  Gabrielle ‘Coco’ Chanel becomes the mistress of a rich man named Etienne Balsan, and a protean member of his household.  She’s a fixture in the bedroom but positioned in a social no man’s land between the servants and the society guests who seem ever present at his sumptuous pile just outside Paris.   After twenty minutes or so, I was getting impatient for Coco to move on in the direction of the career that made her immortal; not much later, I realised with dismay that she and we were going to be stuck with Balsan’s coterie for the bulk of the picture.  Audrey Tautou as Coco seems anxious to get out too – or at least to be given something to do beyond looking unfulfilled.

    Coco Before Chanel seemed surefire box office for the Richmond Filmhouse.  It’s on at the Odeon too but seeing a French film (with an haute couture heroine) at that fleapit would be a contradiction in terms for senior citizens of the borough who rarely go to the cinema but will turn out for Anne Fontaine’s movie.  (This demographic surely explains the preponderance of French films, many of them duff, at the Filmhouse.)  It was a mid-afternoon Saturday performance and a nearly full house; in the early stages, quite a few of the audience kept chuckling hopefully at the slightest provocation – the way they would during a first act at the Richmond Theatre, which they perhaps visit more regularly.  But they fell silent pretty soon; I think we were all benumbed.  Anne Fontaine and Camille Fontaine (her sister?), who co-wrote the screenplay, include some details which make psychological sense – for example, that Coco Chanel’s antipathy towards the flouncy excesses of contemporary fashion, her penchant for elegance through economy, derived from the austerity of an orphanage childhood.  But the Fontaines’ script completely fails to dramatise the material:  and Coco Before Chanel is as lacking in depth as in trashy energy (which might at least keep you entertained).

    As a costume drama, the film has the odd subversive moment:  it’s unusual to see a parade of lavish frocks on screen only for the leading lady to deride their inhabitants for not being able to move in their corseted finery and for hats that look like lumps of meringue, as Coco does when she sees the beau monde on the beach at Deauville.   But the same point has been made repeatedly by this stage – and the Fontaines seem to have little else to say.  While Coco Before Chanel withholds some of the nearly guaranteed pleasures of the genre – the protagonist’s inevitable progress towards fame and fortune, the reculer pour mieux sauter rhythm of that progress – it lacks the imagination to put anything in their place.  Anne Fontaine retains some staple ingredients of the biopic.  We learn how the main character got their nickname (in this case, singing a well-known song about a dog called Coco at a cabaret, where Gabrielle first meets Balsan).  As soon as the love of the heroine’s life announces a passion for a particular type of transport, we know he’s going to meet his death in it (in this case, a motor car).  And what’s particularly frustrating about Coco Before Chanel is that even the distinctive aspects of its subject’s situation and character eventually get lost – and merge with biopic convention.  Coco adores Arthur ‘Boy’ Capel, an Englishman who’s made his money in coal.  He wants to keep their affair going but intends to marry a rich compatriot.  Through a combination of disillusionment and desire for Boy, Coco determines never to marry but to carry on her relationship with him.  When he’s killed, the announcement of his death and its aftermath are no different from the episode in many other films when the bridegroom-to-be is snatched by death on the eve of the wedding. (It’s less affecting here because the unusual situation leads you to expect more.)

    Some presumably key moments hardly make sense.  When Gabrielle and her elder sister Adrienne are dropped off at the orphanage, the younger girl looks at the coachman driving away and he emphatically refuses to look back.  In the next scene, the Carmelite nuns who run the orphanage enter a dormitory and ask any of the girls who have visitors to follow them.  There are no takers except Gabrielle, although the nun who leads her down the corridor seems not to be struck by this.  On the way to the courtyard where the visitors await, the black-clad Gabrielle passes a number of children in brightly-coloured clothes.  These excitedly chattering little girls are removed from the premises by those who’ve come to meet them but Gabrielle stands in vain waiting for her father – the evasive coachman of the previous scene.  The girls in red outfits and the sombrely-dressed Gabrielle may work as a symbolic foreshadowing of Coco Chanel’s fashion preferences but not at any other level.   When Balsan, at one of his parties, insists that Coco reprise her cabaret song for his guests, she looks pissed off and sings ‘Coco’ in a joyless, deliberately untheatrical way.  The other guests start singing along with gusto and she looks even more pissed off, and the scene just fizzles out.

    At a fancy dress party, Coco persuades the voluptuous actress Emilienne, an ex-mistress of Balsan, to dress as an orphan:   Emilienne protests but Coco insists that concealing her breasts and legs will make her even more desirable.  Later in the evening, Emilienne admits Coco was right and says that everyone is going wild for her.  But she doesn’t look irresistible and there are no signs of anyone else thinking so – the costume does seem to subdue her sexiness.  After Boy’s death, Coco throws herself into her work and Anne Fontaine moves quickly into the film’s conclusion.  There’s a brief montage of Coco working with fabrics and, the final scene, a fashion show with models in classic Chanel clothes moving past the watchful eye of the designer.   Although they seem designed to do little more than tie up the story, these sequences also make you more aware of what you’ve been missing throughout the previous 105 minutes.  As Sally said, you never get much sense from the film of how Chanel developed her taste or of the pleasure and excitement which you naturally assume designing clothes gave her.

    In these closing moments Audrey Tautou’s professional containment and acuity are striking.  Although her essential innocuousness in what she’s done so far on screen is no doubt part of Tautou’s appeal, it’s clear here that she’s capable of more (as it often was with that other gamine charmer Audrey, with whom she’s sometimes compared).  Tautou also demonstrates – aptly, given Chanel’s philosophy – that she can look great however simply dressed she is.  All the main actors do more than can be expected with what they have to work with:  Benoît Poelvoorde as Balsan, even if you don’t really care about this practised womaniser’s developing real affection for Coco – or believe that this is anything more than an obvious, artificial twist; Emmanuelle Devos as Emilienne, whose big-featured lusciousness is likeable (and who is convincingly sexually ambiguous); Marie Gillain as Coco’s sister Emilienne.   Alessandro Nivola, unforgettably good in Junebug, is Boy.  When he first appears at Balsan’s estate, Nivola looks every inch a continental European aristocrat.  Later on, arriving at the hat shop in Paris where he’s set Coco up in business, he seems more like a male model.  But he’s never remotely believable as a self-made English businessman.  Yet Nivola has real presence – he’s like a dark-haired Ralph Fiennes, but with a capacity for pleasure – and there’s a spark between him and Audrey Tautou.  Nivola can use his good looks to give us a sense of how Coco sees Boy, as a beau idéal at first sight.  He can also HisHHidiminish his handsomeness as the occasion requires.  When Boy tells Coco about his impending marriage and he needs to appear morally ugly, Nivola suddenly looks just that.

    1 August 2009

     

     

  • The Fault in Our Stars

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Josh Boone (2014)

    John Green, the author of the young adult novel The Fault in Our Stars, wanted to write a corrective to stories about teenage cancer sufferers that:

    ‘… sort of oversimplified and sometimes even dehumanized them. And I think generally we have a habit of imagining the very sick or the dying as being kind of fundamentally other. I guess I wanted to argue for their humanity, their complete humanity.’

    The film adaptation of the novel, directed by Josh Boone (his second feature) from a screenplay by Scott Neustadter and Michael H Weber, more or less succeeds in achieving Green’s aim – in, for me, an unfortunate way.  The three main characters are:  Hazel Grace Lancaster (Shailene Woodley), whose thyroid cancer has spread to her lungs; Isaac (Nat Wolff), whom Hazel meets at the support group she unwillingly attends and who loses both his eyes to retinal blastoma; and his friend Augustus ‘Gus’ Waters (Ansel Elgort), who comes along to the group to support Isaac.  Gus’s osteosarcoma is in remission but part of one leg has had to be amputated.  The trio’s vocal and verbal mannerisms and humour make them as tedious to listen to as any able-bodied American middle-class teenager yet I found myself making allowances for this:  I felt I shouldn’t find the kids too annoying because they were terminally ill and/or disabled by their cancer.

    In her opening voiceover, Hazel explains that what we’re about to see is not the usual movie treatment of relationships in the shadow of fatal disease – not a ‘sugar-coated love story soundtracked to a Peter Gabriel song’. To a large extent, though, this is what The Fault in Our Stars turns out to be.  Shailene Woodley is admirable as Hazel but the music, of which there’s plenty, is sweet and wet.  (This goes both for the score, by Mike Mogis and Nate Walcott, and the selection of songs by, among others, Ed Sheeran, Birdy and Lykke Li.)  There’s rather little of the physical rigours of Hazel’s and Gus’s terrible illnesses.   The film confirms that, as a subject for screen drama, living with cancer doesn’t compare with dying from cancer or, especially, experiencing the loss to cancer of someone you love.  The action is fairly boring until things start happening, quickly, during the three-day trip which Hazel, her mother Frannie (Laura Dern) and Gus make to Amsterdam.

    The main purpose of the visit is for Hazel to meet Peter van Houten, the author of a novel, ‘An Imperial Affliction’, about a girl with terminal cancer which Hazel reads repeatedly.  (She admires van Houten as ‘the one person who’s been able to describe what it’s like to be dying but who’s still alive’.)  On their first evening in Amsterdam, Hazel and Gus go for a meal in one of the city’s top restaurants, compliments of van Houten, and realise they’re in love.  Next day, they meet the man himself.  The reclusive van Houten (Willem Dafoe) turns out to be a miserable, misanthropic, cruel-tongued bastard.  His mortified assistant Lidewij (Lotte Verbeek), who set up the appointment with van Houten and the restaurant for Hazel and Gus, tries to make things better by taking the young Americans to Anne Frank’s House.  Hazel’s grave respiratory problems make climbing the many stairs very difficult but she struggles to the top and is revived by Anne Frank’s spiritual example and the voice impersonating her on the audio guide.  Back at their hotel, Hazel and Gus have transcendent sex.  They’ve hardly got dressed when Gus reveals that his cancer has returned and metastasised.  This is something he’s known for a while but which he’s kept from Hazel – and, in order to give his news maximum tragic impact, from the audience.

    Shailene Woodley was one of the better things in The Descendants and, as Hazel, her acting is remarkably concentrated and consistent.  She’s very persuasive as a girl who discovers, to her amazement, that she has much more emotional room for manoeuvre than she realised.  Ansel Elgort, although irritating in the early stages when Gus is all grins and disarming jokes, can act, and his look of wholesome good health does make Gus’s eventual demise shocking.  Nat Wolff does well as Isaac.  The parents in the story get a relatively raw deal, though.  With her squinched eyes and brave smiles, Laura Dern, even allowing that she’s playing a mother trying desperately to be positive, is exhaustingly supportive.  Sam Trammell, as Hazel’s strangely boyish and uneasy father, is easier to take but a bit odd.  One of the most interesting moments in the film comes at an early stage, when Hazel says she spends a lot of her time trying to please her parents.  (It’s the reason why she grudgingly agrees to go to the support group.)  This suddenly made me realise that I’d always assumed that perhaps the only consolation of being in Hazel’s position would be that you, the dying child, would be unfailingly indulged.   At Gus’s funeral, Hazel nearly decides not to read the eulogy she’s prepared (and which, at his request, she delivered at a ‘pre-funeral’ so that Gus could hear it) but changes her mind when she sees the stricken faces of his parents.  Her change of heart and realisation that funerals ‘aren’t for the dead – they’re for the living’ are hardly original but they resonate with the earlier pleasing-the-parents insight.

    It also makes sense therefore that, when Peter van Houten suggests that Hazel is used to getting her own way, this particularly infuriates her.  Otherwise, this episode is weak in several respects.  Given that van Houten refuses to answer fanmail, it’s improbable that Lidewij (who doesn’t bother to clear the hundreds of envelopes from the floor of his house) would set up the meeting with Hazel and Gus.  Van Houten ridicules Hazel for wanting to know what happens to the other characters in ‘An Imperial Affliction’, ‘after the novel ends’.  Insensitive though his reaction is, she does seem too old and too intelligent to be asking this kind of question.  You know van Houten is bound to reappear later on, to make it worth Willem Dafoe’s while.  More important, you need to know what effect the shattering and traumatic meeting with him has on Hazel’s continued reading of his novel.  But at least the novelist’s personal circumstances – his young daughter died of leukaemia – aren’t treated as an excuse for his behaviour.  In his final letter to van Houten, Gus describes him as the antithesis of himself – a good writer but a shitty person.

    Hazel Grace Lancaster’s own terminal illness gives her a distinctive perspective on the death of Gus but, since she’ll die ‘after the story ends’, she’s also a familiar figure in a tale of this kind:  the survivor who loses the love of her life.  The Fault in the Stars as a book was a huge commercial success, widely praised by critics, and the film is following in the novel’s footsteps but it would be worth knowing how popular either has been with young men (or young straight men, at least).   More remarkable, though, and hard to argue with, is what the book has come to mean to those of John Green’s readers who are themselves afflicted with cancer, as described in Margaret Talbot’s recent profile of Green in the New Yorker[1]. Green is a big name not only in young adult fiction but also in video blogging:  his online activity and reputation have clearly been a factor in turning The Fault in Our Stars and, by extension, the disease from which some of his and the book’s admirers suffer, into a shared, social experience.

    9 July 2014

    [1] http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2014/06/09/140609fa_fact_talbot?currentPage=all

     

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