A WHIRLWIND OF CHANEL fever has been whipping up lately; Coco Before Chanel is just a part of it. Karl Lagerfeld celebrated what would have been Chanel’s 125th birthday by designing a Euro coin with her face on it. Audrey Tautou took over from Nicole Kidman as the face of No. 5 perfume in a short created by Amélie director Jean-Pierre Jeunet. And there’s another biopic, Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky, which debuted at Cannes.
Audrey Tautou was born to play Coco Chanel, and it’s not just the physical similarities. It’s that gleam in Tautou’s eye. Whether she’s radiating mischief or furious scorn, she’s able to combine innocence with experience, to find the wild and meek sides of a role and combine elements of both. And while Coco Before Chanel may sound like a fashion magazine editor’s dream, it’s a far cry from simply offering light entertainment for label slaves.

THAT’S NOT to say that there aren’t clothes to look at. Some are hideous - the gaudy stage dresses Coco and her sister Adrienne (Marie Gillain) steal to wear to an audition, and the ostentatious hats worn by high-society woman afraid of "looking poor", which Chanel replaces with straw boaters. But some are understatedly stylish. Chanel adjusts, adapts, and mends. She tries out men’s clothes, dresses up as a boy - all preparation for her modernising women’s clothing by pioneering sharp, mannish outfits. Cue the suit Karl Lagerfeld made especially for the film, with its classic black-and-white Chanel cut.
The film’s early scenes are surprisingly oppressive. It rewinds to Gabrielle Chanel’s early life (the name Coco comes later), showing enough of her childhood to explain why she’s so emotionally shuttered as an adult. Tight, dramatic shots: of the orphanage where she and her sister grow up, waiting in vain for their father to come and see them; of poky dressing rooms; of bed sharing; of bars crowded with people who jostle or sit too close. From Dickensian beginnings, Chanel ekes out a life. Poor, and uneducated, she makes do and gets by.
Everything changes when Chanel moves in with wealthy racehorse breeder Étienne Balsan (Benoît Poelvoorde), or rather turns up to visit his grand chateau without a good reason to leave. Chanel begins making her name by designing hats for Balsan’s lady friends, and it’s the first time there’s a sense of freedom and space.
While Coco Before Chanel sews together disparate strands of her life, it resists the temptation of making the embroidery too neat. From Chanel’s sad, lonely childhood to a bittersweet final act that packs an unexpected punch, it’s not a celebration of pantsuits or perfume or even Chanel the designer, rather a depiction of Chanel, the woman - an outspoken, headstrong individual. The first modern woman, if the closing titles are to be believed, although this is perhaps doing the suffragettes something of an injustice. And this is before you consider that Chanel had an affair with a Nazi officer during World War Two.

IS THIS a rose-tinted view of Chanel’s life? It would certainly have been interesting to see the film include her stint as a ‘horizontal collaborator’, but this is Coco before, and that was after. So while we get to see Chanel leading a somewhat less-than-charmed life, we still don’t get to see the darker side of her psyche - a shame, really, as there are times when the emotional truth seems too far out of reach. But director Anne Fontaine’s first historical outing is both a compelling drama and a lavish period piece.