Coco Before Chanel (Sunday, November 1, 2009) (157)

At some point in the near future we will reach a time when absolutely everyone who lived before 1950 will have a biopic made of their lives. This day will mark a small celebration when filmmakers will feel free to make movies not tied to dull life stories of semi-famous people. We will all dance in the streets as we realize that we don't have to worry about the casting of the William Techumsah Sherman movie (Willem Dafoe) or the life story of Babe Didrickson (Elizabeth Moss) or Jacques Cousteau (Scott Glenn), as all of those films will have been made. (For the record, I have not heard of any biopics of these people, but I would hope that if they ever come, they will cast these people in these roles.) In the meantime, we are left with yet another dull movie based on a dull life- Coco Before Chanel.

I guess Coco Chanel's life sounds good on paper. She was raised in an orphanage and got into 'cabaret' singing in Paris in the nineteen-aughts. ('Cabaret singing' in this film looks a hell of a lot like hooking - but I guess it was different and classier somehow.) She got set up with a rich dude who lived in the country. She was too low-class for him to introduce her to his friends, but she still lived with him and had lots of sex with him. Then she met an English friend of his who she fell in love with. Sadly he wouldn't marry her either because she was a filthy whore-like woman. Still, he got her set up in Paris as a hat designer in the later nineteen-teens - and somehow in Paris, hat designers also made lots of fancy clothes - so she became a fashion icon.

That summary is actually very fair to the movie - where almost 100 minutes are spent with her at her lover's chateau basically doing nothing. It's not even that we see her doing fashiony things like designing ball gowns or something. She spends most of her time on her back in bed with one of two men or bitching about how she wants some independence (as she eats bonbons off a silver tray in the living room of a castle). There is one scene where she makes her friend a rather frumpy dress for a costume party. There is another scene when she finds herself on vacation without an evening gown, so she goes to a dressmaker and asks for a black velour dress with no corset. Big freaking whoop.

Audrey Tautou as Coco is almost asleep, she's so boring. She's cute-ish, but not at all sexy and it's very hard to understand why men would be attracted to her. Her personality is direct and stern and almost never bright or positive. She generally seems like a serious downer who is unaware of her place in the world. (I'm not advocating for the subjugation of women, but it seems silly to me that she should be upset about her low standing in the world in a time when all women were treated as chattel.)

Mostly, the problem here is with a bad script. I think the concept of a biopic of Coco Chanel preceded the research that found that she was a rather unremarkable person before starting her fashion house. In addition, it is not explained why this has to necessarily be a story of her pre-fashion days - and not just a biography of her entire life. It would seem that if one were making a movie of her life, all the content in this film would be one scene when she was 'getting started' (the same way there was one scene in this film about her childhood in the orphanage).

I would have loved to know what she did that was so amazing for fashion (uncorsetted dresses; lower necklines; knit suits in two pieces), how she was inspired and what happened to her in the last 60 years of her life. I don't know these things about her and I would like to. I think that would all be more interesting than this forced, sad romantic tragedy.

Stars: 1.5 of 4