Coco Before the First Wave

Everyone loves a good rags-to-riches story, especially if the riches yield from the world of haute couture, but Coco Before Chanel has none of the Sex and the City decadence or Julie and Julia warmth that a Chanel biopic suggests. Hers is the story of an orphan who goes on to be one of the most influential fashion designers of all time, but writer/director Anne Fontaine chose a more difficult path than merely to show the triumph of perseverance. Fontaine stresses that as much as Chanel had a brilliant mind for design, she was a burgeoning feminist who revolutionized fashion and in so doing irrevocably brought about social change in the Western world by liberating the female body.

The films opens with 12-year-old Coco, then called Gabrielle, and her sister, Adrienne, being quietly abandoned at an orphanage by their father. In the next sequence, the sisters are grown up, working as tailors during the day and singing in a bar for coins at night. Gabrielle is careful to distinguish herself from the hookers she works alongside, but life keeps steering her toward prostitution. Eventually, she befriends a wealthy patron named Balsan and she sleeps with him, then brazenly arrives at his country state and takes up a room in his house, affixing herself as his rebellious geisha. He hides her away from his society friends at first, but she crashes his parties to gain entrée to the world of wealth. Balsan’s friends find her amusing, particularly an actress/courtesan named Emilienne who recognizes the value her in odd sense of style, her confidence in which convinces them all of her relevance and magnetism. This is not to say she was some plucky Pollyanna—quite the opposite. She often pouted in bed or ran away from Balsan only to return and take up her old room without a word of apology or explanation.

Eventually, Chanel meets an Englishman named Arthur “Boy” Capel who the film paints as her great love. Coco falls for him wholly, only to learn that he is set to marry another woman to secure his financial future. Balsan intervenes, showing how much he really cares about Coco by offering to marry her instead, but she rejects the idea of marriage once and for all and leaves for Paris to earn her fortune. The final scene shows a wildly accomplished Chanel being lauded for building her empire, so why then does the ending seem so unhappy?

It could be because the language of the film reinforces that Chanel is alone in life, which is at once her highest ideal and deeply disappointing. Ultimately, the film is, in many ways, about prostitution in all its forms. There are many examples in Chanel’s early life that illuminate how the social structure functioned on prostitution: her sister Adrienne becomes the mistress to a Baron who she falsely believes will marry her, Coco’s friend Emilienne is a stage actress, but she may never have made that dream a reality without selling herself to the men who made it happen. Even though Coco sleeps with Balsan for the lifestyle it affords her, she always makes it blatantly clear that she belongs to no one, running away and returning at will as if to remind him of her need for freedom. It isn’t until she falls in love and wants to belong to Capel that she sees that marriage is a form of financial and social slavery more than it is a testament of love, and she views Capel as the true prostitute for denying himself happiness with her for the money. This is especially vulgar considering Capel is a man who had the opportunity to earn his own fortune in a time when women only worked out of dire necessity. Chanel refuses to be enslaved by Balsan or anyone else but continues on her affair with Capel for years after his wedding and her rise to success. Nevertheless, this dynamic influenced her profoundly, and her continual rebellion from the societal dogma imparted on women became prominent in her designs. Thus, every scene in Coco Before Chanel contains a kernel of what would grow to be the Chanel brand as we know it.

In France in the early 1900s women wore dresses and corsets as a rule; they wore light floral colors, rode horses side-saddle, and bedecked themselves in hats, veils, jewelry, flowers, gloves—“busy” was the theme. Chanel ridiculed these women for their glut of accessories and always praised simplicity as the height of elegance. She rebelled by wearing black as she had amongst the nuns in the orphanage, and she started stealing Balsan’s clothes, sewing his shirt collars into her dresses and sometimes flat out cross-dressing as a stable boy in order to learn to ride like a man. Capel took her on her first trip to the ocean where she saw fisherman pulling in their nets, and was thereafter filmed in striped sailors shirts. She also utilized fabrics like jersey and knit, which at the time were seen as workers’ materials. Most importantly, Chanel refused to wear a corset. The corset was so restrictive to women’s everyday movement and breathing women were constantly uncomfortable, finding it difficult to move and therefore nearly impossible to work. The film draws the parallel that the corset was just another way women were enslaved and by freeing women from corsets Chanel “gave them their bodies back.” There are several scenes where Coco cuts breathing room into the back of a dress or loosens a corset as if she was the only one who believed physical comfort for a woman was actually important. It was her personal philosophy that shapes were sexier, too, without corsets, letting men imagine the silhouette beneath the clothes instead of thrusting breasts out in the open and delineating the waist. She ultimately integrated practical, comfortable men’s clothing into women’s lives that physically enabled them to do whatever they wanted but still retained elegance and style.

Perhaps the most interesting part of Coco Before Chanel is that anyone can walk away from the film seeing Chanel’s influence all around us, on our own bodies. Women who have ever worn pants, blazers, tee shirts, or work shirts have all experienced Chanel’s mark first-hand, and it seems important to remember that this sort of pedestrian fashion has the same origin as the out-of-this-world-expensive Chanel brand as we know it. Twenty-first century Chanel is a buck-naked Keira Knightly covering her breasts with a hat to advertise perfume. And it is hard to separate the idea of the Chanel suit as an avatar of the stuffy Conservative woman, but this film has the power to jar that image loose and appreciate the brand as one of the first true empires built by a woman.

Audrey Tautou was remarkable as Coco Chanel, playing her without a hint of Amélie girlishness. Still a wide-eyed beauty, she was utterly convincing as a chain-smoking difficult, and fiercely determined orphan, filling the sparseness of dialogue with a whole world of action behind her eyes. Even her smile was something hard to understand—it didn’t seem to be coming from a place of happiness but rather as a symptom of momentary pleasure.

This is a film that is quintessentially French. It is very matter-of-fact in its presentation of the scenes, effortlessly elegant, without a hint of Hollywood. Competently crafted, rife with moving performances and bold themes, Coco Before Chanel is easily one of the best movies in a long time. -Christianne Hedtke

Write/Director: Anne Fontaine