Movies Features

Coco Chanel in the Movies

By Anne Brodie Jul 7, 2010, 15:21 GMT

Paris 1913 at the Theatre Des Champs-Elysées, Igor Stravinsky premieres his The Rite Of Spring.Coco Chanel attends the premiere and is mesmerized…But the revolutionary work is too modern, too radical: the enraged audience boos and jeers. A near riot ensues. Stravinsky is inconsolable. Seven years later, now rich, respected and successful, Coco Chanel meets Stravinsky again - a penniless refugee living in exile in Paris after the Russian Revolution. The ...more

Coco Chanel and Igor Stravinsky opens in America this week, detailing the 1920 love affair between two legendary visionaries of our time. 

The film is jammed with gorgeous things, it’s beautifully photographed, and the leads – Mads Mikkelsen and Anna Mouglalis are rather dishy. 

But it’s a superficial, unsatisfying film that fails to utilise their colourful stories and historical significance in favour of a sombre, limited romance.

There are surprisingly few comprehensive films about Coco Chanel.  Chanel Coco & Igor Stravinsky, in theatres now, looks at a brief time in the 20’s when she took a famous lover and developed her signature scent Chanel N°5. 

Last year’s Coco avant Chanel was well liked but easy on the facts.  Considering the designer’s colourful life and contributions to culture, it’s a shocking oversight. 

The French couturier swept the design world clean of the past in the teens and twenties, and as a testament to her importance, the house of Chanel remains as strong or stronger today, eighty years after it opened.  Chanel helped usher in the modern age.

She was born into poverty as Gabrielle Bonheur Chanel in 1883.  Her early years in rural France were Dickensian; her mother died when she was young and her father gave her away to an orphanage.  She learned to sew at the home and relatives encouraged her to develop a budding talent.

Gabrielle switched gears to become a cabaret singer and assumed the name Coco, which she said, was short for “kept woman”.  A wealthy lover kept her in apartments, jewels, and money as she established two millinery boutiques. 

A strategic friendship with a model gained her access to leading figures in French society and she worked her way up the ladder with rare determination.  Coco was soon friends with royalty, leading artists, writers, composers and the cream of the social crop of the day.

As her fame spread Chanel made up a new back-story, claiming she’d lived in America.  She is rumoured to have had several affairs, including one with a Nazi officer during the occupation of France during Word War II, but never married claiming she preferred to be just “Coco”.

Her influence as a couturier is immeasurable.  Her style is coveted around the world; her brand lasts.  Chanel’s style innovations included the little black dress, the beige sling back with black toecap, Chanel N°5 and N°19 perfume, the tweed suit, the jersey dress, the chain belt,  the total look, costume jewellery, the topstitched bag with gilt chain, and the cashmere cardigan, in short, the basis of the modern wardrobe. 

It all began with the simple, pared down, menswear inspired lines she conceived during the First World War when women were still in long skirts with bustles.  She was a true original and the only designer to achieve a place on Time magazine’s list of the Top 100 People of the 20th Century.

A 1969 Tony award winning Broadway musical Coco starred Katharine Hepburn; an inspirational childrens book called Different like Coco teaches that being born poor is no impediment to success.  And two new biographical films are rumoured to be under consideration.  Let’s hope they do her justice.

Chanel’s life story is rich with cinematic potential.  It touches on the history of the century and its cultural development, on love, sex, manipulation, and the art of survival. 

But of the major films on her life, Une femme, une époque, Chanel Solitaire, Coco Chanel, Coco avant Chanel, and now Chanel Coco & Igor Stravinsky, none coimpletely taps the potential of the legend that is Coco Chanel.