Category Archives: Movies

So my Bastille Day ended not in a taxi after too much champagne and not lying on my stomach moaning after too much foie gras, rather in the Cinema with an inhuman amount of popcorn watching the highly anticipated Chanel Biopic Coco Avant Chanel.

There was tears, it was a beautiful movie, Audrey Tatou is an incredibly talented actress and thankfully it was in French. However for someone who holds this story particularly close to her heart and someone that has read the Charles Edmonde-Roux novel it was based on, so many times I’ve lost count, I couldn’t help but be disappointed.

The film drops you into her life at six or seven, answers no questions about her mother and father or family and quickly progresses to her late teens when she leaves the Orphanage she was raised in and finds herself singing Caberet in Saloons. So much of her life was ingrained in her Family history and her time in that Orphanage, it was such a shame they left it out.

The film then spends a significant amount of time focusing on the two most significant men in her life and the experiences in her twenties that really helped to shape her. Important, yes, but as a result the film ends in her Thirties and jumps from these men very abruptly to a runway show at Rue Cambon with no real storyline as to how it happened. They leave out the enormous amount of seamstress work she completed at various places in France previous to such romances and essentially ignore much of the groundwork that would become the Chanel empire.

As I said earlier it is a beautiful film, but it is such a small display of her life with such disregard to her fashion that they may as well just have written a love story tragedy script in English, cast other actors and released it for what it is: a true Hollywood popcorn flick. There is a lot that is true Chanel but there was so much missing that I would have found it difficult to understand what was really going on had I not read the book so many timess.

Absent was her romance with a Russian Duke, her time with the Ballet Russes for whom she designed Costumes, her time with the Avant Garde in Montmartre, her time in Hollywood dressing for the Silver Screen, her romance with members of the Surrealist movements, her involvement with the Nazi Party and most importantly the real inspirations behind her fashions, fabrics, designs and distaste for Aristocracy. There wasn’t even any reference to her Costume Jewellery or Pearls.

I know I sound confusing but I didn’t hate this movie, it was a beautiful surface level account of her early life and the relationships that set the tone for every relationship after. Audrey Tatou was a brilliant Coco Chanel and the rest of the cast put up outstanding performances. I just felt cheated that fifty odd years of her life were ignored and replaced with three sentences explaining that she died alone, working right up until the moment of her death. They left out so many amazing things that she did.

For those that see the movie and have a real interest in her life I would definately read the original biography by Roux, which will no doubt be available in every bookshop imaginable now that the film has been released. It is a long read but a very comprehensive account of not only her life, but Paris and Europe during the war and the Surrealist movement and Ballet Russe. I would recommend it to anyone interested in any of those.