Born in a poor house and raised in an orphanage, Coco Chanel spent her first
twenty years designing her life. She became the primary fashion designer of the
20th century, famous not just for the clothes she designed but because her core
intuition led her to innovation that changed the culture of modern women. “Coco
Before Chanel” is a thoroughly charming telling of her early life. The delicate
Audrey Tautou becomes Chanel.
Coco meets
Etienne Balsan (Benoit Poelvoorde) while working in a tailor shop with the
sewing skills she learned in the orphanage. Shortly after Etienne returns to his
estate outside Paris, Coco makes the first of her pragmatic decisions and
follows him. She moves in and becomes his mistress. He gives her clothes,
diamonds, and boredom. Etienne’s guests are all rich, indolent, and covered with
flounces and cascades of fabric; how else, one woman asks, can they avoid
looking poor.
Coco, unable
even to imagine being able to do physical things while encased in corsets,
padding, stays and underskirts, realizes that women are merely prisoners of
their clothes. They are diminished, she knows, by the frivolous feathers and
flowers attached to their dresses. They look like trash, she tells herself. “Too
many feathers, too much ma keup, too much everything,” she says of the
constructed woman. How can they do anything?
And so the
lovely young woman moves through Etienne’s social life in her unadorned straw
hat and a striped fisherman’s jersey under a tweed jacket. Balsan himself
remarks, “Shoes with no heels, hats with no feathers, that’s my Coco.”
When Etienne
proposes, she faces the fact that she simply can’t stand him or his world, and
refuses. At this point she falls in love with a guest, Arthur ‘Boy’ Capel, and
he with her. When Capel moves to England to marry an heiress, Coco refuses to
continue as his mistress (for the moment anyway) and replies, “I’m moving to
Paris. I’ll make my fortune.”
Audrey Tautou
gives a restrained and subtle performance that reveals Coco’s admiration of
dignity and simplicity in all things. She never married, didn’t believe in it,
and thought a woman in marriage was doomed to unhappiness. Tautou also manages
to convey the enormous reserves of strength that powered this woman who grew up
without a family and turned away from the easy avenue of being an ornament on
the arm of a man.
The movie
closes with Chanel sitting gracefully on a white staircase overseeing an early
collection. Dressed in her signature suit, white with braid and metal buttons,
Chanel, in the delicate presence of Audrey Tautou, is the embodiment of the
style she had been designing for all her young life. She succeeded in defining
elegance through simplicity with her designs, and sublimely, also gave women the
comfort and freedom they had never known. The elegant woman in white at the top
of the stairs finally allows herself a broad smile.
Copyright (c) Illusion