‘Coco Before Chanel’: A Hard Road to the Little Black Dress – The New York Times

Chanel deliberately made clothes that allowed women to move and breathe. But much of her style was born of the materials she had at hand. In the movie Coco confects an outfit from ties and shirts raided from Balsan’s closet. Her innovations did more than alter the way women dressed, Ms. Leterrier said: “She changed their gestures. She invented the shoulder bag to liberate women’s hands.”

Ms. Fontaine also acknowledged Chanel’s contribution to female emancipation. “She wasn’t an ideologue, but she was a kind of precursor to feminism,” she said. “We don’t realize it today, but to live in a corset was a kind of prison. It was extraordinarily inventive to liberate the woman’s body and to invent those supple lines.”

Ms. Fontaine said she wasn’t worried about competing with the expanding Chanel film library. Last year Shirley MacLaine earned an Emmy nomination playing an older Chanel on the verge of her ’50s comeback in a Lifetime TV movie directed by Christian Duguay, “Coco Chanel.” The Lithuanian model Edita Vilkeviciute is Chanel in Mr. Lagerfeld’s 10-minute, black-and-white, silent-film tribute to his predecessor, which served to introduce his 2008-09 “Paris-Moscou” collection. And the French actress Anna Mouglalis depicts yet another Chanel — the one who had an intense affair with the composer Igor Stravinsky — in Jan Kounen’s “Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky,” which received mostly lukewarm reviews when it closed this year’s Cannes Film Festival. (It is having its North American premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival this month, with an American release planned for January.)

Ms. Fontaine said she had decided early on that Ms. Tautou alone could convincingly personify Chanel. “I don’t like a performance where you have to rely on makeup and prostheses,” she said. “I like incarnation, when the work doesn’t show. Audrey has both the physique and the personality to be Chanel. I couldn’t imagine another actress who could be her and not imitate her. And she is intrinsically French. Audrey Tautou could not be another nationality but French, and that was very important, because Chanel is a pure product of France.”

Ms. Tautou said it wasn’t the first time she had been approached to play Chanel, who coincidentally spent part of her childhood near Ms. Tautou’s hometown in the Auvergne. “Even though she was a figure in the region where I grew up, I had the same knowledge that most people have about Chanel — next to none,” Ms. Tautou said a few days before the film opened in France in April, sipping a Coke in the presidential suite of the Hotel Bristol. She was wearing jeans, short hair and a loosely tailored black jacket draped on her clothes-hanger frame.

“The Chanel myth exists, but the Chanel that is known is the older Chanel,” she said. “We have no hint of what her destiny was, even in France. But I didn’t want to do some kind of biopic because she lived until age 87. And 87 years reduced to two hours — well, you can’t not fall into clichés. I didn’t want to make a film for fashion specialists but a film about her personality, her loves, her determination.”

Ms. Tautou said Ms. Fontaine had persuaded her that Chanel’s early years offered the most dramatic promise. “She was in the midst of affirming her character, and she met the two men who would have a determining role in her life,” Ms. Tautou said. “She wanted to make a fortune, to extract herself from her milieu, to become someone, just like a man, and not depend on anyone — without knowing how she could do it. Nobody could have expected her to become who she became. I think it’s very novelistic to show at what point an exceptional destiny like hers can hang literally by a thread.”