La mode se démode, le style jamais” (Fashion goes out of style, never style itself), Coco Chanel once famously proclaimed. It is a sentiment that looms large over Anne Fontaine’s sumptuous 2009 biopic of the famed designer, starring Audrey Tautou, one of France’s favourite ingénues in the title role, released on DVD this May. Chanel’s influence on fashion today is so ubiquitous that it is hard to understand the extent to which she revolutionised it during her career. Equally difficult, then, is Fontaine’s task of ascertaining where exactly the woman ended and her iconography began.
Chanel’s early years read like the tragic plot of a Balzac novel: born Gabrielle Bonheur Chanel into an impoverished family in a small town in western France in 1883, she was one of five siblings. Her mother died when Chanel was 12 and her father left the young children in the care of an orphanage run by nuns while he sought work. It was here that Chanel learned to sew (although professional biographers point out that Chanel’s abilities with a needle and thread did not extend much beyond straight seams and she made use of professional seamstresses as soon as she could afford them). At 18, Chanel became a cabaret singer. Her nickname, Coco, comes either from one of the songs she sang in the nightclubs of Moulins and Vichy or it is a shortened form of ‘cocotte’—slang for mistress; the latter being the explanation Chanel herself has offered. Etienne Balsan, a polo-playing, horse-breeding cavalry officer with a textile fortune, became her lover. So far, so very Toulouse-Lautrec.
Exposed to high society as Balsan’s mistress, Chanel’s story slowly shed its Balzacian deprivations and turned into a Colette novel as she gained ground in society circles, taking up as a hobby designing hats for the wives and mistresses of Balsan’s wealthy friends. Having pestered Balsan unsuccessfully to financially back her, Chanel left him in 1913 to open her first shop in Paris, which quickly went under. Starting a new venture on the eve of the Great War was not the smartest decision she’d ever made, but it gave her a taste of independence and her first lesson in the business of couture. She relaunched herself, a feat she would repeat many times with great success, with the help of Arthur ‘Boy’ Capel, Balsan’s former best friend and (supposedly) the love of her life. Chanel opened a millinery boutique in the fashionable seaside town of Deauville which was a success in attracting a wealthy clientele intrigued by Chanel’s pioneering style. And, indeed, it was intriguing. She innovatively unfastened the corset, thus far the staple of a woman’s wardrobe; cut away the frills and bustles of La Belle Époque; introduced costume jewellery as a wardrobe staple, and raised hemlines in knee-length skirt suits, matched with boxy jackets and large pearl necklaces. She would, of course, go on to ‘invent’ the staple of female wardrobes: the little black dress that could be worn throughout the day or at night, depending on accessories, amply demonstrating Chanel’s philosophy that fashion should be functional first. The fragrance that would bear her name, Chanel No. 5, would become legendary for its uniquely non-floral scent well before Marilyn Monroe famously confessed that it was all she wore at night. The legend of Chanel couture derived from these innovations, offering women the choice of dressing as they pleased and freeing them from uncomfortably limiting gowns that dictated which activities they could, or more often could not, pursue. The frou-frou clothes of the fin-de-siècle were discarded in the wake of this new femininity that revealed women’s bodies free from strictures—the literal embodiment of the modernity that was overtaking European art, culture and literature. This is the journey Fontaine’s film takes us on, hinting at, but ultimately ignoring, the rest of her fascinating life.
Chanel’s affair with Capel would last ten years, continuing through his marriage to an English aristocrat, ending with his tragic death in a car accident. In the heady 1920s, Chanel took up with the enfant terrible of classical music, Igor Stravinsky (whose notoriously discordant composition ‘Rites of Spring’ provoked riots), and later with the fabulously wealthy Duke of Westminster who she refused to marry because, as she pithily commented, there may have been several Duchesses of Westminster but there was only one Chanel. In the inter-war years Chanel’s roster of artists for whom she was muse (and possibly lover) reads like a who’s who of the 20th century avant-garde, including ballet impresario Sergei Diaghilev, Pablo Picasso and novelist Jean Cocteau (who likened her iconoclasm in fashion to something usually afforded painters, musicians and poets). When WWII broke out, Chanel temporarily closed shop but soon returned to business as usual, directing her affairs from a suite in the Ritz in Paris where she lived with her German lover (the delightfully named Hans Gunther von Dincklage) and from where she seldom emerged until the war was over. In 1943 she initiated a bizarre scheme to convey German peace overtures to Churchill, for which she would forever be tainted with the epithet of collaborator. She moved to Switzerland at the end of the war only to return to Paris shortly after, disappointed with what she saw as the return to regressive corsets à la Dior’s New Look, relaunching herself again at the age of 70. Although by now rather unpopular with her countrymen for her wartime exploits, she gained an astounding popularity with American and British clients that endured. Jackie Kennedy was a great advertisement for brand Chanel, from popularising the sporty Parisian-chic look in her Camelot days to the tragically stylish pink suit worn that fateful day in Dallas. Chanel died while designing a collection at the age of 87, still ensconced at the Ritz.
With a life that reads like a novel, it was only a matter of time before Chanel’s exploits inspired cinematic depiction. Fontaine’s film is, therefore, not new thematically but rather follows in a long line of attempts to chronicle Chanel’s life.
What is new (and also problematically intriguing) is Fontaine’s attempt to position the narrative of the woman before she became the legend. It is a tricky task since most scholarship on Chanel is based on her own invented fables—from the origins of her nickname to the fudging of her birth date. It is also complicated by the fact that without the legend of Chanel, her story is hardly fascinating, although Fontaine tries to sidestep this by means of a montage at the end featuring many models parading in Chanel’s most recognisable styles, thus hinting at the glory that was to come. But the most striking feature of such a limited timeline is that it allows Fontaine to fetishise Chanel without having to deal with her uncomfortably close associations with the Nazis (a topic still guaranteed to get French audiences in an angry lather). It is rather in period texture that Coco Before Chanel shines: using first drab and washed out greys to depict Chanel’s Zola-esque origins, then flouncy floral creams and pastels to depict the lacy, corseted world Chanel is introduced to by Balsan, and finally stripping away to the glossy simplicity that she invented with its clean lines and minimal fuss. Only infrequently does the film offer the discerning viewer the opportunity to spot seemingly trite biographical influences on Chanel’s style, with rare sightings of sailor stripes and intricate stitches on nuns’ wimples. The clothes, as one would expect in a film about Chanel, offer their own narrative of escape and freedom within the story that is otherwise painted as a love triangle between Chanel, Balsan (played by Benoît Poelvoorde) and Capel (Alessandro Nivola). The romantic twists of the film could veer into terrain that is more sentimental than chic, hinting that Chanel’s motivations to liberate fashion originated in her desire to liberate herself from dependence on wealthy men. But rather than the soap-opera distraction they might have been, Fontaine ably strips away much of the melodrama in favour of an aesthetic that inadvertently privileges Chanel’s stylistic endeavours over her romantic ones.
Tautou’s Coco is an unlikeable character, fierce and aloof, with none of the twinkly-dimply charm of Amélie Poulin on display (and certainly none that Fontaine’s camera deigns to capture), which makes her a devastatingly attractive choice for the role. Her stark oddness, cutting dialogue and androgynous grace are visual reminders of the rupture that Chanel caused in fashion circles. Tautou’s straightforward and rather disagreeable portrayal of the icon doesn’t detract from any spectatorial enthusiasm for the character of Chanel; instead it reveals just how far the legend spread and will not pin her down to anything other than a cipher of painfully chic mystique. Coco Before Chanel may fail in its quest to expose the woman behind the mythology of fashion’s most enduring legacy, but it does so by way of a beautifully evocative journey.
(Region 2, BIG Home Video, Rs. 599)