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