Blu-ray Review

While I may have thumbed through a fashion magazine or two in my time, I was never even remotely one for fashion history, so I came into Coco Before Chanel with a clean slate and an open mind. Expecting to learn fascinating tidbits about what made Coco Chanel the woman and designer she would become, I was left disappointed. The film is pedestrian in that it fails to rise above any of the biopic genre clichés while it is busy trying to avoid them.

Coco Before Chanel paints the typical story of a young woman from impoverished beginnings rising up to become a celebrity. For a much better film detailing the same thing, please see La Vie en Rose. Coco Before Chanel, perhaps self-conscious about the trappings of biopic genre clichés manages to barely make the film about its titular subject. This could have been a simple poor girl to star story, in which the main character just happened to be named Gabrielle ‘Coco’ Chanel. We begin with her in an orphanage, jump thirteen years to find her singing in a saloon, where she naturally meets a wealthy admirer. It is at this point the script gets flipped a bit and we find that the shrewd calculating Coco chase her admirer after he leaves her. She shows up at his estate as an uninvited house guest after lying about why she was there and never leaves. A fish out of water tale ensues for the second act as Coco flounders about a bourgeois society she reviles, yet takes part in as a means to an end all the while dressing like a boy. Eventually, a white knight by the name of Arthur ‘Boy’ Capel enters into the picture to provide moral support to Coco. Eventually, our heroine becomes his mistress and he funds her first foray into the world of fashion. The rest as they say, is history (but only after Boy dies and we get a Rocky-styled, but slowed fashion designing montage preceding a glorious fashion show).

Apparently Coco before Chanel was a liar who whored herself out as a mistress in order to get her big break. Or rather, as the film puts it, she was a rugged individualist that favored love (with married men) over marriage who did whatever it would take to become the great woman we all know and wear.

Believe it or not, the above tedium that is Coco Before Chanel is made somewhat tolerable by the wonderfully expressive performance by Audrey Tautou. Tautou is a confectionary delight of an actress that probably would have been one of the great stars of Silent Hollywood thanks to her petite features and mastery of the wry glance. Her presence alone takes away some of the cynicism with which I previously described story when she is on screen. But sadly, she is not in a romantic tale or an imaginative film where her talents have been better utilized, but a staid biopic that goes so far to avoid dramatic biopic genre clichés that it manages to avoid eventfulness as well.

Sony Pictures Classics has included an original language French DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 surround track for the film, which renders the dialogue and score effectively and crisply. In some of the earlier saloon sequences the ambient noise and general barroom clatter is the high point of the audio presentation. Otherwise, the film is as muted as its color scheme.

Overall, the technical qualities of this disc are an exercise in more than necessary, but that is the way films should be presented on Blu-ray. This disc perfectly captures with ease the artist’s intent in the video/audio design of Coco Before Chanel.