SnoopyStyle Gabrielle Chanel (Audrey Tautou) was abandoned by her father to an orphanage in 1893 after her mother's death. Fifteen years later, she's performing with Adrienne at a moulin cafe gaining the nickname Coco. In her day job, she's a seamstress. Her ambition to perform is stymied and she becomes the mistress of wealthy customer Étienne Balsan. She grows frustrated as his kept woman and falls for his friend Boy Capel. The fashion of the day are corsets, big dresses, and bigger hats. Chanel never fits that style but has her own sophisticated modernity.The movie looks beautiful. The designs are well made. Tautou's performance is restrained. They need to explain her childhood and early life more completely. It's hard to find the feelings early on. Chanel and Capel seems to have an one-note love-at-first-sight romance. The drama is lacking. The movie mostly falls flat except when fashion gets a mention. Her fashion business journey would probably be better material for a movie. This is lackluster drama.

blanche-2 Coco Chanel had an amazing, fascinating life, though I don't think one would know it from "Coco Before Chanel," released in 2009.This is the story of Chanel (Audrey Tatou) from her shabby beginnings as an orphan to the beginning of her great success as a couturier. It is through men who take an interest in her that Coco succeeds - first, Étienne Balsan (Benoît Poelvoorde), and the love of her life, Boy Capel (Alessandro Nivola). Capel is the man who first established her salon in Paris, and she was so successful, she was able to repay him all of the money he invested. He also may be in part responsible for the look of the "Chanel No. 5" bottle.The production is dazzling -- costumes, scenery, and Tatou is good as Chanel, a young woman who takes a dim view of love before even falling in love. Once she does, she wants it all - marriage, settling down, but it is not to be. Alessandro Nivola is stunning.Unfortunately, Mr. Nivola's handsomeness and the lovely Ms. Tatou can't make up for the dreadfully slow pace and dull story. The beginning, with Gabrielle (Coco) and her sister as a singing duo was really the best, and then it kind of fizzles out after she becomes involved with Balsan.I haven't seen every single thing ever made about Chanel, but I know that there were aspects of her life, such as her Nazi leanings, friendships within the British government, her dealings over Chanel No. 5 with the Wertheimers - that are very compelling. I'm not sure how they would play out on screen, but she was an important figure in the 20th Century, and as such, deserves to have her entire story told. The TV movie with Shirley MacLaine told the story of the late part of her life, whitewashing what went on before, and this tells the beginning. Let's see something of her activities in the '30s and '40s on the big screen.

PipAndSqueak The portrayal of Chanel's character is throughout the film flat and unnuanced. You'd never believe she was in real life the 'life and soul of the party', capable of wheedling her way into the hearts and minds of monsters and angels alike. There were no insights, no demonstration of how radical she was, how WILD. Instead, all we see are broadly drawn stereotypes. There were some very famous women contemporaneous with Chanel who impersonated men on stage – e.g. Vesta Tilley for one, any of whom could have provided the model for Chanel to follow. We got no sense of their existence. Did we get any real sense of the limited options available to women at that time? Only slightly. I wasn't at all convinced by this film although I thought Audrey Tatou did as much as she could do with the material she was given. The whole could have been a whole lot better.

lasttimeisaw To be frank, this biographic film about legendary Gabrielle Chanel is disappointedly plain and perfunctory although it has a Chanelesque panache in its appearance and hardware. For me the dialogue is poorly written, full of clichés which could be easily eavesdropped during any cheap romantic chick flick. As it is a film about Chanel (especially as the title itself suggests that it's a film about her life before global success), the importance is to underline the uniqueness inside her which would bring her the later prestige fame, unfortunately the payoff of the film is her two bog- standard relationship both as a mistress, which eludes the most intriguing question, how could she manage to infuse her offbeat talent into the fashion business at her time? The film skimps a larger portion of it (which we could only witness from her intermittent scenes with Emilienne, an underperformed Emmanuelle Devos).Audrey Tautou did a great job to showcase Coco's pride and fragile in the same shot, as for two supporting lovers, Alessandro Nivola is handsome enough, but with a rather wooden performance, the chemistry between the lovebirds is far from convincing, which directly hampers the whole keynote of the film and demotes Coco's personal mien as well. On the contrary the ordinary-looking Benoit Poelvoorde deserves more recognition for his rough but more empathized interpretation as the rich womanizer, Baron Balsan. The fancy costumes of the film are worth appraising and it doesn't matter if you are in fashion business or not. But we are not watching a documentary or a fashion show, it is beyond its power to save the film itself from being a mediocre one.