FEATURE FIEND: COCO BEFORE CHANEL

While I really like French actress Audrey Tautou, Amelie is an all-time favorite of mine, I was really hesitant to go see her latest film Coco Before Chanel, but because I'm a good guy I took my woman to see it. (I'll later exchange this by dragging her to some stupid action flick, Bwahaha!) That said this movie wasn't that bad, and overall was pretty inspirational. As you can gather by the film's title, it's the story of how Coco Chanel matured from being a night club singer to start off her fashion designing business. Of course there is more to it than that, but at its core this is a fairly simple bio-pic, a story of a woman who had nothing, but made something out of the talent she neglected.

As someone who admittedly knew next to nothing about Ms. Chanel, I was quite interested to see how she completely changed the face of fashion in France, and ultimately the world, just by being true to herself at all times. It's this uncompromising truth that drives Audrey Tautou's performance, which is quite good, to the point where you feel the actress was trying to make a point herself. One of the two main male leads, Mr. Benoit Poelvoorde outshines her, though, as an older lover/friend with whom she shacks up with for much of the film. His character is spontaneous and fun, but sad as well, and the perfect symbol of old Paris. And while the story really navigates the romance channels by creating a love triangle between Tautou, Poelvoorde and Alessandro Nivola, the end result of it allows Coco to see who she is, and emboldens her to move past conventional wisdom to just go for it. Once this happens, accolades for Chanel's work comes quick, at least in the movie.

And therein lies the complaint we both had. This movie spends little time getting into the intricacies of becoming a designer, instead her artistic progress is used more as a way to chart the time passed. I would've liked to see her getting into the business more, as the end feels rather abrupt, but I guess that wasn't the point of the story. The story is about her getting there, not being there, and in that director Anne Fontaine succeeds.

One last quick note, and a pretty cool thing about going out to see this, was that I finally got to go to the Paris Theatre, which is really rather gorgeous. We sat in the balcony and felt special. Shy of seeing this French movie there, though, I'd say wait for the DVD.