Coco Before Chanel | Period and historical films | The Guardian

Maybe the success of La Vie en Rose, with its Oscar-winning performance from Marion Cotillard as Edith Piaf, created a new fad for feisty, flawed French heroine-survivors from the first half of the 20th century. Two movies were made this year about the great designer and fashion pioneer Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel. One, Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky, is about her friendship with that great composer: it closed this year’s Cannes film festival but so far has no UK release date.

Then there is this one, directed by Anne Fontaine, a handsomely dressed and tastefully furnished drama that rolls out pretty conservatively, but is notable for two excellent performances. Audrey Tautou is the gamine couturière herself – a role she was probably born to play – and the Belgian actor Benoît Poelvoorde, still perhaps chiefly renowned for the 1992 shocker Man Bites Dog, here plays Étienne Balsan, the worldly, wealthy plutocrat who takes up Coco as something between his mistress, his protege and a sleek cat who purrs in and out of his sumptuous home as and when she feels like it. Alessandro Nivola plays Arthur “Boy” Capel, the British playboy with whom Coco falls passionately in love, and Emmanuelle Devos is Emilienne d’Alençon, a glamorous French stage star who popularises Coco’s designs and does a little lesbian-lite flirting with her.

This is, as the title says, Coco Avant Chanel: Coco before she became a brand, became public property, and it seeks only to tell the story of her life until around the end of the first world war, when she was in her mid-20s. This way, the film is not forced to fudge the question of her behaviour during the Nazi occupation of Paris, when she was criticised for an apparent liaison with a German officer: the Piaf movie tied itself in knots avoiding the collaborative elephant in the drawing room, skipping nervously and confusingly around the wartime era. Coco Before Chanel makes a virtue of amplifying a period that in a conventional biopic might take around 25 minutes. In Coco Chanel’s troubled early life, it seeks to trace the genesis of her personal style, and perhaps the DNA of the fashion world itself.

Audrey Tautou’s Coco starts life as an orphan; with her sister Adrienne (Marie Gillain) she does a singing double-act in various provincial cafes, crooning an adorable little song about a dog called Coco that gave her the nickname. She haughtily permits the wealthier and more obviously infatuated clientele to buy her champagne after the show, but refuses to submit to the status of good-time girl. An attempt at cracking the Paris showbusiness world with Balsan’s help goes sour, and she has to earn her bread as a dressmaker, but nonetheless impudently arrives at Balsan’s country estate expecting to be taken in; her slightly bemused patron agrees and even presses his sexual prerogative, but there is something in Chanel’s imperious and bohemian psychological makeup which will not let her become anything as banal as a kept woman.

Freed from the drudgery of earning a living, Chanel has the leisure to notice what is amiss with women’s clothes – though her observations are never carried forward into a critique of women’s behaviour or women’s social or political status. Their clothes, she sees, are too fussy, too uncomfortable, too absurd; these cumbersome garments are apparently worn for men’s approval but succeed in pleasing neither sex. She herself defiantly affects a boyish style of short hair and simple clothes that efface those “womanly” curves, which in her eyes are matronly and unchic. It is a style that hints at homosexuality but of course entrances powerful men, including Capel, who murmurs that these clothes are easy for him to remove. With the money and social connections of Balsan, Capel and d’Alençon behind her, Coco is in a position to establish herself as a designer and to revolutionise and actually invent fashion. Capel’s own tragic fate is something that causes her to retreat from love and pour her emotions solely into her art. The clean lines of her designs and elegant high-contrast juxtapositions of black and white owe something to mourning, and to a need to surmount mourning, to a need to please men and yet to do without them as well.

There is something very unhurried and even a teeny bit sluggish about the pace of all this. But it certainly gives Tautou the chance to show that she can carry off a big role in a big movie, and portray a complex, creative personality. This is a world away from Amélie’s simpering ingenue. It is a cool, unshowy performance, probably not histrionic enough to get a prize, as Cotillard’s Piaf did. Poelvoorde gives an excellent supporting turn as Coco’s sponsor and a sugar daddy who gets less sugary as things progress. It is a worthwhile, well-made film: though it would have been more interesting to see Tautou really tested, playing Chanel into her maturity and old age.