wytchcroft

Finally got to see the movie Coco before Chanel which I’ve wanted to catch for quite a while;
Very enjoyable it was too. Easy on the eye and the mind and with a lot of humour and some excellent back and forth dialogue which is generally very well played. Audrey Tautou gives an excellent performance, her character refuses to back down, smile on demand, play the coquette – it’s her most interior role since Dirty Pretty Things.

So it feels a little uncharitable to have to say anything negative – but, holy wow what a weird wasted opportunity the film is – and slick? You could use it to oil the hinges in your mansion!
For starters it’s one of those rags to riches stories of social climbing that manages never to show the bottom of the ladder – there is not a single poor person in the film, not one. So perfectly were the proles airbrushed out of the narrative that I found myself wondering if it was for the censor, well , merde - the poor means an 18 certificate for sure and we can't have that now can we?.

Still, style really can be substance and hardly a frame couldn’t be used for an expressive dust jacket for something or other. It's beautifully filmed and there are indeed some wonderful shots of wool sitting half ignored on a hardwood surface whose grains are a melancholy autumn tone of rich gold. This IS the Coco Chanel story after all, so everything is material, from the furniture of the various plush dwellings to the skin of each actor in close up. And these things; objects, moments, faces, are not meaningless.

WARNING: Many gratuitous and deeply frightening limp moustaches are seen in very close detail, a Freudian piece of symbolism perhaps. Talking of which, and it’s almost Shakespearean, Coco dresses in male style clothes (cross between Chaplin and Patti Smith) which look wonderful anyway but are worn by Audrey Tautou who, well, plus belle – naturally. She then tells people that when the lights are off, "skin is just skin", not male or female... before picking up with a man whose name is ‘Boy.’ Fun and games huh?
But the films own jaw seems to drop because it clearly doesn’t know what to do with all that sort of thing, too seedy perhaps or to freaky, a bit like the poor - or the actual working process that leads to the dazzling fashions seen at the close of the movie. That lack of process is the opportunity squandered, at least for a fashion and textiles junky like myself. I wanted to see how these creations got made, what choices were involved and what processes. It’s like a film about Picasso only without the painting.

There are good natured scenes of St Coco rescuing glad ladies from whale-bone corsetry (in real life come the 1950s and she gave it back again, lest we forget. Hepburn wore Givenchy and Dior for a reason!). And such things do gladden the heart. The film concludes by noting that Coco succeeded in her battle against a male dominated world. Yes, we do get to see that world. It has two men in it. Decent enough chaps in their way. So again, hearts are gladdened.
Of course as yet another Sarkozy era détente picture, that’s exactly what the film wants to do, to gladden its audience, to make friends with it.
Anyone who has watched the gradually increasing conservatism of French Cinema as well as its increasing revisionism and hard-sell abroad, ever since Amilie (according to some), will loathe this flick and Tautou once more, but it has to be said, just as with the British ‘heritage movies’ of the 80s, it’s not rubbish that’s being knocked out here. Coco is a good movie, just as La Vie en Rose was or Moliere or Female Agents. And if it makes flicks like La Haine and Les Amants du Pont Neuf orThe Vanishing feel a thousand years ago – so too it rids us of pseudo-intellectual gack like The Piano Player and Ma Mere and reconnects with the sheer cinema of pictures like Manon des Sources and The Reader. No bad thing. Just empty. And I knew that when I went in – really, sometimes it’s just for the eye candy and… so what?

Go see it and have a good time.

WARNING: If you are a chain-smoker like me, be warned, there many lovely cigarette moments that (if you are watching in a cinema) will drive you insane!