Coco Before Chanel

The title is deliberate: not Chanel but before Chanel. It covers the years when Gabrielle Chanel had not yet founded a house, when she had come out of an orphanage, sang in provincial cabarets and lived in an ambiguous position in a rich man's château. Its best idea is explaining the designer's emergence through irritation rather than inspiration. Gabrielle hates corsets, feathers and enormous hats because she has had to wear them. She takes men's shirts, cuts jersey, cuts her hair. Style is not a matter of taste here but of being able to move. Audrey Tautou plays Gabrielle, Benoît Poelvoorde the man who keeps her at the château and Alessandro Nivola the Englishman she loves. Anne Fontaine directed. The film never enters Chanel's conduct during the war; it ends the story well before that. It is a good choice for anyone who wants to watch a woman construct her own life rather than the making of a fashion icon, and a poor one for anyone who wants documentary accuracy.