Most hotcha actresses desperate to be taken seriously as thespians slather on the ugly makeup and strap on the fake proboscis. Not Audrey Tautou. In the biopic Coco Before Chanel, which details the fashion baroness’ early years as a turn-of-the-century pioneer for independent women, the actress settles for a severe attitude change.
Suppressed, completely, is her pixie charm, revealing a cold, unfriendly, almost badass sourpuss. Or is she really just doing an impersonation of her nation’s number one ice queen, Isabelle Huppert? Either way, it’s a more successful makeover than her unconvincing Albanian immigrant in Dirty Pretty Things, though the role doesn’t require much acting.
Really all Tautou has to do is never smile and look vaguely pissed-off. She lets her natural features do the bulk of the work. Her lithe frame, high cheek bones and sunken, Henry Silva-esque cheeks, give her Chanel a fragile menace. With her copious hair trapped in a stern bun, her mutation into a proto-Anna Wintour is complete.
Director Anne Fontaine (of the fizzy romp The Girl From Monaco) is right there beside her. Coco Before Chanel, which jumps from a happily brief stint at an orphanage to her days as an impoverished seamstress, is, like its protagonist, tough-minded and proudly feminist. Chanel speaks disparagingly of love and marriage, and when she’s whisked away to the remote estate of an adoring, oft-soused millionaire (Benoît Poelvoorde), the terms are largely, though not strictly, platonic. It’s there that her shtick is born—a style that nixed girly feathers, heels and corsets in favor of a more mannish look, an attempt to neutralize the genders.
And yet even with a feminist icon as the subject, and even with a female director, Coco Before Chanel feels bizarrely obligated to frame her story through her relations with a man. True, the film holds out for a good while, not introducing One True Love “Boy” Capel (Alessandro Nivola) until the hour mark. But it comes to dominate the rest of Fontaine’s version of the Coco Chanel story, which ultimately says this woman—who never married and spoke so cruelly of amour—wasn’t a frigid bitch because at least she loved one man. So much for feminism. But for a good while there was a film where the independent woman was truly allowed to be independent. C+
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