wcbe: : Coco Before Chanel (2009-10-17)

Having long ago suffered with vicarious love of Tess of the D'Urbervilles from the early 19th century, and then experienced romance recently through Fanny Brawne and John Keats in Bright Star, I thought I'd have to wait much longer to see a satisfying heroine on screen from the last 150 years. Now I'm in love again, this time with Coco Before Chanel. That title states the circumscription of the tale, as Audrey Tautou skillfully portrays Gabrielle/Coco before she made an empire.

That the two recent films are directed by women, Jane Campion of Bright Star and Anne Fontaine of Coco Before Chanel, serves a testimony to the ability of women to tell an interesting tale that pleases both men and women. I am most pleased by Coco's detachment from the messiness of marriage and her resolute singleness, not that she didn't at one time desire the comforts of a nineteenth century attachment in marriage. She just finally figured out she didn't need the state.

The film has caught better than most the inglorious dependency of women, even in the Belle Epoque, on men and the ability of a woman to transcend the sexism through her talent outside the bed. I like the film's fairness to history, which reminds us that a woman as gifted in fashion as Coco still must start her career through the auspices of a man. But in her case, she partners in business with the love of her life, Arthur "Boy" Capel (Alessandro Nivola), a self-made man, and not even the rich man who most loved her, Etienne Balsan (Benoit Poelvoorde). It's all too complicated for my little review, but I must state that like her hats, she remains unique and hardy.

Tautou portrays Coco with a bemused distance from everyone but her loving sister, whose entire future by contrast is bound up with the fortune of a baron. Fontaine keeps Coco's fashion sense growing by regularly having her sewing and making clothes for others. Her famous black and white appear as well but with less prominence than you'd expect.

Coco could have ended up like Lea de Lonval (Michelle Pfeiffer), a relic in Cheri of the dying Victorian Age, gilded by the Belle Epoque and destined to the margins with the emergence WWI (both films are set at about the same time), but she didn't. She stayed a spinster and built an empire�the kind of heroine I can love.