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Follow Audrey Tautou's eyes, those deep dark pools, rake across the drape of a fabric or the architecture of a hat with fierce concentration. She's not merely looking; she's observing, thinking intensely.
In Anne Fontaine's admiring but not uncritical "Coco Before Chanel," Tautou plays an iconic clothing designer who was also a kind of philosopher. She wanted to liberate women from their crushing corsets, peel away their suffocating veils and let them move freely. Chanel used couture to liberate herself and her customers. In the process, she designed an adventurous life for herself.
The film, although sumptuously produced, is a staid and conventional account of her early years. We meet young Gabrielle Chanel in the back of a horse cart, en route to an orphanage where she's dumped by her peasant father with hardly a backward glance. The nuns' severe black habits make an impression on the aspiring seamstress but don't influence her adolescent wardrobe choices.
Performing a saloon cabaret act with her sister, "Coco" dresses in French can-can froufrou. Although she was on display, she turned the situation to her advantage: The music hall was a fine place to meet rich men. Still in her teens, she truly was a designing woman.
She settles on homely, wealthy Etienne Balsan (Benot Poelvoorde) because "he's smarter than the others and he knows people." The racehorse aficionado is intrigued by her gamine charm and impressed by her audacity when she storms his house uninvited. In short order, she is his mistress.
The calculating Coco works to beguile her patron, dressing in shockingly boyish fashion and learning to ride. Her temporary stay lengthens until she's a fixture of the manor house, making hats for Balsan's former conquests. The idea that there is a good living to be made in fashion begins to dawn.
Balsan's feelings ripen from a species of friendship into something like love. Yet when his friend, English financier and polo player Arthur "Boy" Capel (Alessandro Nivola), asks Balsan if he can "borrow" Coco for two days for a seaside trip, the landowner's code of behavior obliges him to agree. Coco assents, as well, both because she's infatuated with the handsome "Boy" and because she sees him as a backer for her millinery business.
Fontaine films with a romantic eye and some moments of inspiration. In a scene at a grand ball, women in stuffy formal attire swirl and part until Tautou is revealed dancing in an evening gown of elegant simplicity. At that moment you can appreciate how radical her vision was.
And how practical. There's a funny scene with Coco and a lover who declares gratefully, "Your clothes are so easy to take off." Hooray for progress!
Tautou makes Chanel crafty, sometimes unsympathetic, but always restlessly intelligent - drawing inspiration from her surroundings as if by photosynthesis. Still, the film glosses over the designer's complex and sometimes unpleasant personality, and skips the heart of the story - her growth from a designer of hats to a visionary entrepreneur. It also omits the messy World War II years and Chanel's affair with a Nazi spy.
"Coco Before Chanel" is exquisite on the surface but barely peeks behind the seams.
