Audrey Tautou’s Unsentimental Education as Coco Chanel – The New York Times

True to its title, “Coco Before Chanel” chronicles the early life of the woman who would become perhaps the single most influential figure in 20th-century fashion. But the film, directed and co-written by Anne Fontaine, bears less resemblance to a standard-issue biopic (like, say, “La Vie en Rose,” to take a recent French example) than to a novel by Émile Zola or Theodore Dreiser. With a mixture of brutal candor and tender sympathy, it charts the rise of an ambitious, difficult woman, taking note of the obstacles and opportunities offered by her time, place and circumstances.

The tale begins in an orphanage, where the Chanel sisters, Gabrielle and Adrienne, have been deposited by their father. An inkling of Gabrielle’s eventual vocation is provided when the audience is directed to notice her noticing the stitching on the nuns’ wimples, but for the most part Ms. Fontaine avoids the easy prefiguring that deadens so many film biographies.

She also steers clear of the kind of literal-minded psychologizing that finds the germ of future greatness in childhood trauma. Gabrielle and Adrienne, grown into Audrey Tautou and Marie Gillain, wind up in a provincial music hall, singing mildly naughty songs — one, about a lost dog named Coco, provides the nickname with which Gabrielle becomes famous — and trying not to be mistaken for the prostitutes who also frequent the place. Gabrielle, chain-smoking and sarcastic, confronts the world, and the men in it, with a wariness that borders on hostility.

She is, from the start, a complicated, frequently uncharming character, and Ms. Tautou’s fierce and sinewy performance represents a decisive break with the dimpled-pixie typecasting she has been struggling against since “Amélie.” One fact of Gabrielle’s life is that a woman without money or status can only acquire them by attaching herself to a man, ideally as a wife but more plausibly as a mistress. And so Adrienne finds a baron to keep her, while Gabrielle, after some combative flirting, hooks up with a playboy in uniform, a worldly and cynical fellow named Étienne Balsan (Benoît Poelvoorde).