Coco Chanel, legendary French designer and one of the great forerunners of modernism, was a notorious liar. From her birth in a poorhouse in 1883 (she claimed to have been born a decade later) to her Dickensian childhood in a Catholic orphanage (she claimed to have been raised by aunts, who beat her, when her wealthy parents fled to America) to her heyday as a fixture among European elite (never having married, she denied affairs with everyone from the Duke of Westminster to German Nazi Hans Gunther von Dincklage) – Chanel lied about
everything. Even the most seemingly solid thing about her – her pioneering aesthetic of minimal chic – has been up for debate. What exactly are we to make of a woman who – as was discovered on her death - had secretly furnished her apartment in exactly the colourful rococo style she’d spent a lifetime denouncing?
Ann Fontaine’s film Coco Avant Chanel, out this week on DVD, takes a refreshing stand on these questions: it doesn’t answer them. Focusing on the decadent phase between Chanel’s orphaned childhood and the launch of her legendary fashion label in Paris, Coco Avant Chanel is less interested in making sense of its subject than in celebrating Chanel’s lies, evasions and fits of self-exile. By putting Chanel’s mystery at the centre of her story, Fontaine achieves something far more interesting than a portrait of the artist as young girl: the coming of age story of an unconventional woman.
Fontaine introduces us to Chanel (Audrey Tatou) as Gabrielle, an 18-year-old Moulins cabaret singer who exudes a premature weariness and indifference – qualities unlikely to win her the wealthy admirers so desperately sought by the other girls at the dancehalls (including her sister Adrienne, played by Marie Gillain). Yet it is exactly her cynicism, combined with a sexual matter-of-factness, that ingratiates Chanel to French millionaire Etienne Balsan (Benoit Poelvoorde), a man given to amusing himself with the young exotica of la vie bohème. Young Gabrielle is too smart to fall in love with her rich admirer, but correctly sizes him up as an opportunity. After a few well-planned lies, she manages to plant herself more or less permanently among the elite of Balsan’s Chateau de Royallieu, a country estate that serves as a playground for assorted bored, over-indulged nobility and nouveau riche of turn-of-the-century France.
Shot in faded pastels and harsh natural light, Fontaine’s Royallieu conveys perfectly the excess and ennui of its wealthy inhabitants – attitudes that inspire the young designer to rebel. In contrast to her adoptive family, Chanel cultivates a counter-aesthetic that is increasingly minimal, working-class, (her famous striped jerseys were inspired by the uniforms of fishermen) and androgynous. By the time she falls in love with Balsan’s friend Arthur “Boy” Capel (Alessandro Nivola), an English businessman, her promise as a designer is apparent enough that, having refused to marry her, he is eager to finance a hat shop for her in Paris. That business would, of course, be Chanel’s first step to creating her era-defining fashion label.
The triangle between Chanel, Balsan and Capel gets a lot of play in the film, and it would have been tempting to give the designer the kind of art-as-consolation narrative often foisted off on headstrong female characters (“so she wanted a man after all!”). Thankfully, Fontaine doesn’t go there. Instead, she uses Chanel’s ping-ponging affections to point out her deep contrariness, her almost compulsive need to cast herself as an outsider in every world she longs for, at the exact moment it seems within reach. A recurring visual in the film is of Tatou shot from behind, indifferently watching some scene to which she ostensibly belongs: cabaret girls shrieking with their admirers in a dancehall tavern, nobles tumbling together at a masquerade-turned-orgy, vacationers mingling at the beach. Even the film’s final scene, which flash-forwards to one of Chanel’s acclaimed couture shows, places the designer at a remove from the action. This isn’t Betsey Johnston cartwheeling down a runway. Chanel observes her own success in pristine isolation at the back of her mirrored stage, her mysterious smile preserved in multiple reflections.
If contradiction was what made Chanel, the woman interesting, it’s what made Chanel, the fashion label, irresistible – especially to that generation of gin-drinking, hair-bobbing, jazz-dancing dames who eventually won women the right to vote. It is impossible to underestimate the importance of the designer who gave us the little black dress and consigned the corset to the scrap-pile of fashion history. Fontaine suggests a greater impact still: by dispensing with the corseted creampuffery of Edwardian garb, Chanel offered women a wardrobe in which they could move freely and, crucially, be taken seriously.
Chanel’s quintessential looks – the crisp white shirts, the plainly-cut suits – were at once simple and mysterious, unrestrictive and modest, class-free and sophisticated. When, in the film, Balsan accuses her of dressing too sparely, too unfeminine, the young Chanel is appropriately nonplussed: she wasn’t interested in making women look unattractive. Beauty was banal; beside the point. What Chanel wanted women to look was complicated. To this day, when women want to convince a love interest of their brilliance or a work interest of their beauty, they reach for the French-est, which is to say, the most Chanel-like things in their closets: look-but-don’t-touch shift dresses, classy/sexy spectator pumps; double and triple-strands of pearls.
Whatever the facts were of Chanel’s life – and Fontaine has no choice but to pick and choose among them – it is refreshing to see a female artist on screen whose complexity is left in tact, who isn’t made “sympathetic” (read: bland) through a lens of mental illness, addiction, or unrequited love. In the current Hollywood tradition, where male characters are brilliant and conflicted but women are “kooky” or “free-sprited”, Coco Avant Chanel does a good thing to remind us that its heroine’s difficulties are inseparable from her brilliance. In contrast to that ferret-owning, bicycle-riding cliché, Fontaine gives us a female artist whose genius lies in how at odds she was with her time, her place and – as is often the case with important minds – herself. Behind every extraordinary woman are some extraordinary choices. It is good to be reminded of that.
- Alexandra Kimball
