CityLife

Coco avant Chanel (Coco Before Chanel)

FOR any non-fashionistas out there, this is a biopic of Coco Chanel, the woman who dared to imagine the little black frock, dresses without corsets, hats without frills and clothes cut in definite lines with masculine influences.

Despite what the ads might lead you to believe, it has little or nothing to do with the awful Sex And The City film, which was simply a nauseatingly unfunny celebration of a particular sort of female airhead, obsessed with fashion to the exclusion of real life.

Coco Before Chanel, on the other hand, is very much about real life and how sometimes fashion, like music or sport, can offer a way out of an unpromising beginning.

In fact very few beginnings this side of Edith Piaf can have been less promising than that of young Gabrielle Chanel (Lisa Cohen).

With her mother dead and her father off in America, little Gabrielle is sent with her sister to an orphanage, where she waits in vain for her father’s return.

She grows up working as both a seamstress and a small-time, fairly talentless cabaret singer, where she earns the nickname Coco (and turns into the luminous Audrey Tautou), after a song she and her sister (Marie Gillain) frequently perform.

Seedy nightclub

In the seedy nightclub world, she meets the older, and much wealthier, Etienne Balsan (Benoît Poelvoorde), who becomes her sugar daddy, even as her innate sense of style leads her to design hats and clothes that radically challenge the traditional clothes women around her are wearing.

Her flaunting of convention is, it seems, as much an opportunistic marketing tool as it is a manifestation of freedom of spirit and but it certainly begins to draw attention to her talent.

Meanwhile, as she struggles with her reliance on Etienne’s romantically-inspired kindness, she meets and falls in love with Englishman Boy Capel (Alessandro Nivola).

Inevitably, this is all art-designed to within an inch of its life and the film is, perhaps understandably, reluctant to be too critical of its heroine’s sometimes shady morality, let alone her more dubious political associations.

However lovely it looks, however, this film would be very much less watchable were it not for a wonderful performance by Tautou, who manages to be both audacious and vulnerable, waspish and tender.

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