Coco Before Chanel: Enjoyable but Formulaic Biography

"Coco Before Chanel" is what you'd expect from a mainstream French film biography. Gorgeous cinematography, art direction and costumes, a soupcon of intelligence in the screenplay (but not too much to scare off the bourgeois audience), and a substantial portion of melodrama -- including of course the tragic and untimely death of a major character with whom the protagonist is in love. Vive l'amour!

In 2007 we had "La Vie en Rose" (which landed Marion Cotillard a much-deserved Oscar), and this year we have "Coco." Mainstream bourgeois cinema is alive and well in the country that invented it.

Audrey Tautou does a reasonably good job as the legendary fashion designer and luxury-products pioneer Coco Chanel, but she certainly won't be getting an Oscar. She exhibits three or four different emotions in this two-dimensional film, and she looks great doing it. I learned a few things about Ms. Chanel, such as that she was an uneducated orphan who had to struggle up from the gutter by any means necessary, including being mistress to a wealthy man (read: prostitute). I also didn't know that she brazenly broke social taboos by never marrying.

It was a pleasure watching this woman develop her revolutionary approach to women's clothing. The film probably overstates it, but there is good reason to claim that Coco Chanel invented the 20th century in terms of women's clothing and thereby gave the modern woman a whole new outlook on her own capabilities. It was wonderful to see a young Coco raging about the idiocy of nineteenth-century corsets, for example. "You'd prefer not to breathe?" she bravely asks women of the haute bourgeoisie.

Director Anne Fontaine does a good job revealing the way 19th-century upper-class women were dressed up to do nothing but display their husbands' wealth. Women could barely walk under the weight of the dresses, petticoats, hats, gloves, jewelry and parasols they wore in 1890s France. Ms. Chanel, without a single person to guide her it seems, dreamed up a whole new world where women could actually move when they went out in public. This is an inspiring story. But the screenplay, co-written by Ms. Fontaine, has about as much depth as there would be if the Lifetime Channel had commissioned it. Enjoyable, yes, but not a work of art.