All those years of buying Chanel No. 5 for my mom and never once did I give a thought to there being a woman behind the perfume – or a story behind the woman. Coco Before Chanel imagines what that story might have been.
As the title suggests, the movie relates how Gabrielle ‘Coco’ Chanel (Audrey Tautou of Amélie and The Da Vinci Code) overcame her life as an orphan and how she earned her nickname ‘Coco’ while working as a somewhat sleazy nightclub singer.
From there, we see how she rode the broad shoulders of several of society’s best men straight up to the top of the staircase, reached out, and grasped the prize. She became the fashion icon we now know. But it wasn’t without some heartache and tragedy.
A liaison with Baron Balsan (Benoît Poelvoorde), a fatherly figure, allows her initial entrée into French society as well as a chance to develop her penchant for designing increasingly popular and decidedly non-frilly hats. But it was her passionately reckless romance with English businessman Arthur ‘Boy’ Capel (Alessandro Nivola) that most sent her down a one-way melancholy path.
Capel’s nickname is as descriptive as Chanel’s is aloof. He’s a living, breathing manifestation of the ‘bad boy’ archetype – a boyish, irresponsible, and deliriously irresistible man. He sweeps her off to places that seem fantastical to her orphan eyes and he makes love to her in one place after another with abandon. He’s a memorable rogue, the best thing in the movie.
I’ve never been terribly enamored with Tautou. When surrounded by all of the fancy visual flourishes of Amélie, she managed to effectively obscure that she’s a pretty-faced nothing. The Da Vinci Code then exposed her limited range for all to see. Tautou tries to cover the emotional emptiness by chain-smoking and it almost works. I’ve always loved the sight of smoke swirling around a beautiful actress.
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