Coco before Chanel

Anne Fontaine

Co-written and directed by Anne Fontaine, Coco Before Chanel, which features Audrey Tautou as the eponymous and revolutionary fashion designer, is a picturesque guide through Chanel’s formative years. The biopic brings a narrative drive to Chanel’s early life, which is as unfamiliar to the general public as her designs are iconic. Chanel’s famed reticence and tendency to fabricate her own history bring new meaning to the idea of a self-made woman. Tautou’s nuanced performance guides us through the icon’s process of forming her distinct aesthetic and identity before emerging as the Chanel the world came to know.

An obvious hitch in the film’s otherwise smooth trajectory is Chanel’s present status. While the audience is familiar with her designs, which not only came to define a new era in female fashion but have also persevered as part of one of the most successful contemporary fashion houses, the designer’s private life remains a mystery. The feminist icon that became the sole proprietor of the couturier that still bears her name did not start out as such. The film traces her navigation through the male upper class world—a voyage not without its own particular storms and difficulties.

Gabrielle Chanel’s father abandoned her at an orphanage in rural France. And although she goes on to work as a singer in a café, this is no little red-headed Broadway star. She maintains far too much mystique and moxie to fall straight in to the lap of a millionaire bachelor. That is not the Coco, we know—well, don’t know—and sort of kind of love.

After meeting Etienne Balsan (played by Belgian actor Benoit Poelvoorde), the aristocratic playboy that christened our heroine “Coco” in honor of a famous song, she enters a fleeting affair. Balsan quickly retreats to his country estate. Much to his surprise, Coco shows up and does her best to insert herself into the joviality and decadence of French country life. The initial courtship is somewhat unsettling: The terms were established when Coco told Etienne that she would never fall in love. However, when Balsan tries to get Coco to leave, she persists, seemingly at the cost of continuing an affair she has very little interest in.

It is life with Balsan that exposes her to the frivolous and extravagant fashions favored by the French elite. This is, of course, a film about fashion, and the costumes do not disappoint. In a sharp juxtaposition with the Victorian fashions of the day, Chanel creates her own clothing from Balsan’s riding gear, cutting a distinctly rider-meets-Peter Pan pose throughout most of the action. There is surprisingly little chic in her early clothing. The woman who went on to define the way other women dressed was dressing herself as a little boy would. Nevertheless, the hints of her ultimate aesthetic are present: simplicity, the ability for the female body to move, and a clean color palate stripped of unnecessary ornament.

Another romantic and personal focus is the somewhat moody relationship between Chanel English industrialist Arthur “Boy” Capel (played by American actor Alessandro Nivola, TC ’94) who challenges Chanel’s previous insistence upon the impossibility of love. Nivola learned French for the role and speaks it impressively throughout the film. However, the portrayal of the affair itself is somewhat wooden: Boy meets Girl. Boy is the first person to call Girl elegant. Girl falls in love?

It is only at the end of the film that we see the Chanel that is familiar to the public. The final shots are a bizarre conflation of past and present. While Tautou looks exactly like Chanel, poised at the top of a winding staircase in an iconic tweed suit, the models wearing her fashions are decidedly the tall and waifish models of today, breaking with the period of the film. The ending also feels somewhat abrupt: The transition from Chanel wearing riding jodhpurs and men’s bowties to designing eveningwear for the upper class is somewhat murky.

The roots of her designs are well presented and investigated, but her development into the eventual business and artistic figure remains unexplored. While Tautou’s performance is compelling and historically accurate, the film on the whole lacks the emotional punch of Marillon Cottilard’s La Vie en Rose. The film tries to develop Chanel’s personality and history beyond the work she produced. However, in her life, the work became all encompassing, and while the film is visually arresting and pleasant to watch, it struggles with how to do justice to a life that Chanel was so ready to leave behind and today has completely abandoned in the public.

A Serious Man

Joel and Ethan Coen

A Serious Man unfolds in that most Coen-esque of worlds, one punctuated by eerily quaint neighborhoods, crisp uncompromising light, mousy men in plain unwrinkled shirts, dull rambler homes sprinkled across nice lawns, fronted by azaleas. It is a world these brothers, who unabashedly act as joint writers, directors, producers, and editors of each of their films, reprise again and again. For Joel and Ethan Coen, a semblance of order belies the absence of structure, a notion that, more often than not, is rather funny. “Controlled chaos” may be the best description for the cold atmosphere of Fargo, or for their more recent blood-lined venture, No Country for Old Men; it certainly is at play in A Serious Man, a whimsically intelligent farce (or tragedy—it depends on the outlook) set in the late ’60s whose aura of Jewish existential malaise reminds us that Jewishness, in all its malcontented, hypochondriac glory, has never been too remote from the Coens’ cinematic universe.

At the center of this suburban whirlwind is Minneapolitan Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg), a physics professor whose growing misfortunes identify him as a direct descendent of Job of Uz and Woody Allen, and whose slicked wave of brown hair constantly threatens to splash down his forehead and drown him. Larry is, to say the least, unfortunate. A Korean student threatens to blackmail him if he won’t accept a hefty bribe in return for a passing grade; his wife has left him for an older and larger man; his blubbering brother pals around with gamblers and may be suicidal; and, as if all this weren’t enough, the goy next door keeps mowing on Larry’s side of the lawn.

How to deal with all this? Larry is in the tightest of mid-life cruxes and seems withdrawn from any semblance of real friendship, which leaves him at the mercy of the three local rabbis. Each of the meetings with the rabbis is introduced with characteristic Coen whim by a dramatic title card (“The First Rabbi,” “The Second Rabbi,” etc.) and a heavy bell toll of jocular gravitas. Appropriate, because the rabbis—one of whom resides in an enormous chamber crammed with menorahs, tefillin, and yads—hold anecdotes, parables, and quirky stories up their robed sleeves, but no enlightenment.

Isn’t there some order in this confusion, some way to account for it all, some system that can override Heisenberg or Schrödinger’s pesky feline and impart just the slightest touch of certainty to Larry’s world? For the film to use such questions as its main intellectual fodder may imply a drab heavy-handedness on the part of the Coens. After all, these are very big questions, and seem to require a very big movie. But A Serious Man is filmed and scored with such careful simplicity (one could almost say minimalism), such rigorous attention to form and detail, that its recurring dark jokes concerning the big man upstairs never lose steam, never become overrun with a ruining profundity.

The success of this movie, then, has little to do with grandiloquence and everything to do with caricature; characters in A Serious Man are a world upon themselves. Even the minor figures in this particular swath of Coenville abound with an authentic personality: the unblinking, half-naked housewife next door who has tanned herself orange; Larry’s son Danny, a red-haired rebel who smokes weed moments before his bar mitzvah; Larry’s wife Judith, a harpy crowned by a solid globe of hair and a demeanor like glass. We’ve seen these types before—and, surfacewise, they are nothing if not traditional products of the suburban ’60s. But the film enhances and refreshes these stereotypes in such a way that dull, familiar models become strange, uncanny creatures. It is this acute depiction of individual quirks, accents, and oddities that have established the Coens as our era’s cinematic Dickens.

The beauty of this kind of movie lies in its valorous ability to recycle familiar tropes into stunningly unusual environments. Each film excavates the rustic light-heartedness underlying the shadowy depravity of a particular American space (Arizona, North Dakota, and Terrell County). They have studied everything from L.A. bowling culture to cyclopean Bible salesmen to empty plains of snow, but until A Serious Man they have never tackled the simple and fundamental point of their Judaism. We might expect something different this time around, something deadly serious. How refreshing, then, to discover (once again) that the Coens are still in on the joke, that they remain dedicated to their notion of a world laden with irony and coated with a fine varnish of refreshing mockery.