Sorrow breeds empires. Midway through the film the unexpected happens, Coco falls in love with a man and wants, unbelievably, to marry him. Unfortunately, he’s marrying into money to a rich woman who’s the daughter of a coal magnate. And so Coco’s stubbornness vows never to marry anybody—a vow she holds her entire life. Many a lesson may be learned from Coco Avant Chanel (Coco Before Chanel), but a movie is beautiful not for the morals it projects, but for the way in which it projects them.
Audrey Tautou is impenetrable—even her eyes are actresses. There’s one scene where a line of models is walking down a staircase past Coco and her eyes scan each one up, down, analyzing every seam, every button, every frill. In the beginning of the film Audrey portrays a stubborn Coco, unwilling to love, unwilling to set aside her pride, protective of her sister and their sisterhood. She says to her sister in a scene where they share the same twin-sized bed (the portrait of poverty and orphan-hood), “The only good part of love is making love. Too bad you need a man for that.”
The cinematography is picturesque. More than once I found myself basking in the image laid out before me. The characters were completely silent yet the scene and the on-point acting of each of them meant that every static moment wasn’t necessarily a still moment.
Coco seems to be convincing herself she’s not a gold digger throughout the course of the film but when a man of wealth springs up in the cabaret she works at, she jumps on the tail of his coat and follows him all the way to his country-side estate. She is controlled—somewhat—and abused—somewhat—but finds in this man a companion. He grows possessive of her and the audience is made to believe that Coco, in one way or another, is special from most every other girl in the world. Contrary to what you might expect, Coco criticizes nearly every fashion statement throughout the film, “Too many feathers, too tight, too many adornments,” etc. She sees the world of the high-class, in the film at least, as boring, frivolous, and absurd. But when she’s offered the chance to dive into it, she doesn’t deny it; she studies it. The camera takes the place of her eyes many times and we find ourselves studying the garb of nearly every woman in the film, not by choice, but out of our duty as viewers. And it’s entertaining, enticing.
Coco falls in love with a man who lends her money (money he gets from marrying a rich woman) so that she can open a hat shop. His marriage to another woman is the beginning of her misery. With this misery she finds the energy to work. One line she reads from a book in the film—and promptly denies as ridiculous—goes something like “the poor are happy because manual labor offers a distraction for the mind from suffering.” Though she denies it, she lives by it. She’s beginning to flourish as a designer, but doesn’t truly bloom until her lover is suddenly and unexpectedly killed in a car accident. The film shifts immediately from his death to her success. We see her cut, sew, design, and model through a gloriously sculpted montage. You can’t help but see her transition into the class she put down for most of the film and yet, to feel for her.
I’m no fashion guru and I’ve always had an initial disgust for the glam and glitter of designers. Coco Avant Chanel puts all that aside and says that even designers were people too, once.
