The first thing Audrey Tautou does is leap out of her seat and declare: "I love your glasses! I want some. Where did you get them?" At five feet three inches she is petite rather than small, slight as opposed to thin. Excruciatingly gamine, she would make the perfect Peter Pan. Her jet-black hair is cut characteristically short, brushed forward like Audrey Hepburn's in Funny Face, her lips are femme-fatale scarlet, and a white lace blouse perfectly complements old-school Levi's that hang impeccably over a pair of black 1940s-style high heels. Tautou looks immaculately stylish, which must've come in handy for her latest role as the legendary French fashion icon, Coco Chanel, in the hugely successful Gallic period piece, Coco Before Chanel, directed by Anne Fontaine.
"Once Audrey agreed to play Coco I knew I could do the film as I envisioned," said the director just a few minutes before I met Tautou. "I was struck by her will, her audacity, and the density of her gaze that goes straight through you. She has the same impertinent look, the same androgynous appeal, the same toughness and innate sense of style. She is the only person to play Coco."
Undoubtedly, Tautou pulls of the role with uncommon aplomb, delivering a subtle yet multi-layered performance that, with just the arch of a manicured eyebrow, quietly provokes all manner of questions about the icon that some might rather avoid. Did she hate men? Did she use men? Did she sleep her way to success? Did she step on any and all to rise to the top? Or was she purely a product of her environment who had to use all at her disposal to succeed?
And yet the film avoids the most controversial aspects of the pioneering designer's life. Absent is her notorious affair during the war with Hans Gunther von Dincklage, a German officer and Nazi spy, as is her subsequent arrest for war crimes and her acquittal, before trial, via the intervention of the British royal family.
Instead, the film plumps for what is arguably a better story, and deals with Chanel's origins. It begins, like a 19th-century romantic novel, as, Gabrielle "Coco" Bonheur Chanel, born in a poor house on August 19th 1883, is abandoned in the orphanage of the Roman Catholic monastery of Aubazine.
The narrative moves swiftly on to her short career as a bar singer (she took her name from a song she sang in cabaret) and covers her life as kooky concubine to the immensely rich playboy, Etienne Balsan (Benoît Poelvoorde). The film concludes in 1920 after Coco's romance with her financial backer, British millionaire Arthur "Boy" Capel (Alessandro Nivola), ends when he dies in a car crash, leaving her financially free to revolutionise the way women dressed, thought and behaved.
"Premises of projects about Coco Chanel had been submitted to me for several years," explains the bubbly Tautou, now perched on the arm of her chair. "But I did not want to do a biopic, you know – participating in some sort of saga recounting her life from birth to death. Chanel lived for 87 years! We would have fallen into the clichés that have punctuated her path. No, no, no. I was secretly hoping to get an offer to play Coco but with a particular point of view. Because it's her modernity that fascinates me, her spirit, her ambition and the position she gave women."
"Chanel had to fight against conventions then that were so very paralysing for women." continues Tautou, now standing. "So, when Anne Fontaine explained how she intended to treat the subject, I immediately agreed. She wanted to avoid the obvious truisms and some sort of mimetic interpretation of Chanel, and was determined to concern herself solely with her beginning – the period when Coco was building herself and asserting her personality – which for me is the most interesting period in her life."
Source: The Independent
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