Audrey Tatou as Coco Chanel
French actress, Audrey Tatou fits her role as seamlessly as the little black dress that has never been offstage in women’s lives since Coco Chanel invented it.
An orphan from an early age, Gabrielle ‘Coco’ Chanel refused to toe the line as other women did with men, despite her lack of money and resources.
Instead, armed with wit, determination and an audacious sense of style, she took the best elements of men’s clothing - fabric, cut, line and comfort - and invented clothes that took women out of the corset and transformed their lives.
The film Coco Avant Chanel - there are sub-titles - wastes little time on the childhood that Coco Chanel fabricated for herself. It is exceptionally visual, though.
The stark black and white habits of the nuns who welcome Gabrielle and her sister to an orphanage as their father drives away out of their lives -forever, as it happens - are the first of many striking images to be impressed on the mind. And SO it must have been for Chanel.
The film then steps smartly onstage - 15 years hence - with Gabrielle and her sister supplementing their incomes as hat seamstresses by singing in a cabaret act.
Audrey Tatou as Coco Chanel and Alessandro Nivola as 'Boy' Capel
In the film, she tells her sister, “The only interesting think about love is to make love. It’s such a pity you have to have a man for that.”
Her sister loves a baron and, one day, he brings a friend with him: Balsan, played by American actor, Benoît Poelvoorde. At their first encounter, Coco tells Balsan, “When I’m bored I feel very old.”
He asks her, “And how old are you now?”
She replies, “A thousand years!”
This is typical of the relationship that builds slowly between Balsan and Coco. Not altogether a boor with a taste for naughty frolics in the halls and gardens of his estate, Balsan is taken off-guard when a guest, ‘Boy’ - an Englishman - whips Coco’s heart away.
It is Boy (Alessandro Nivola) who helps Coco to find herself; he also funds her business. But it is his unexpected death that spurs Chanel to surpass herself.
The sales of Chanel No. 5 - with Tautou as their figurehead - should go through the roof.
