Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky

To say a film is strikingly subtle may sound somewhat counterintuitive, yet director Jan Kounen's Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky abounds with such precarious artistic contradictions and exploits them with impressive ease. In fact, it seems hardly accidental that Kounen's chosen tone and aesthetic are not far removed from those of Chanel herself: serene, impeccably beautiful, yet with more than a dash of icy aloofness, with a creeping pace and lengthy silent interludes often occupied by nothing more than characters staring with vaguely furrowed brows. Yet in many ways such stillness and silence serve to articulate volumes about the titular characters, the ambiguity of such an approach allowing the viewer to 'fill in the gaps' and piece together the mystery of the characters in the same way they are prompted to envision almost all narrative context.

Kounen's film could hardly be less typical as a biopic in the sense that it eschews any exposition whatsoever, forcing the viewer to independently pursue the cause for Stravinsky's banishment from Russia, Gabrielle Chanel's establishment as an independent fashion designer or the significance of almost every other character in the film – a risky touch which ultimately proves beneficial, adding a more interactive element to the narrative and ultimately trimming all extraneous content to instead dwell on the central emotional arc. Apart from an arresting and mesmerizing 15 minute opening performance of Stravinsky's abrasively modern 'Rite of Spring' ballet and the audience's subsequent cataclysmic uproar, Coco & Igor proves aptly titled, its scope boldly remains one of proximity and intimacy throughout. Concentrating on the passionate affair between the two creative icons, their mutual inspiration and the eventual unravelling of both, Kounen leaves exterior concerns such as the mutual cultural significance of both central characters largely left to the audience to supply, apart from precisely placed thematic nuggets (when Chanel, in a dispute with Stravinsky, articulates her having more money and fame than Stravinsky, the composer spits back "You are not an artist Coco – you are 'une vendeuse de tissues'" – a line whose English translation as 'shopkeep' loses an enormous amount of its acidic contempt).

That said, for a film that skims to the bare essentials of story, Kounen's editing could hardly demonstrate a more contrary knack for distilling. With cameras consistently gliding slowly across empty halls, up winding stairwells or past brooding characters, the film's hypnotic slowness and cloistered atmosphere is executed with a largely elegant flair, but with a pace so sluggish it threatens to become still photography on numerous occasions, such an approach feels undeniably excessive and unnecessarily restrained (the film's ending scenes, in particular, are agonizingly slow). Although Kounen's brilliant use of the staggeringly beautiful and concussively powerful music by Stravinsky helps inspire the film with passion and the few yet extensive sex scenes do breathe some well needed fire and rawness into the film, there does remain a sense of corseted formality throughout which detracts from the film's engagement factor, capturing the stiffness of a traditional biography in lieu of its inundation of facts.

It is a taxing job indeed to retain audience interest through two largely unlikeable, albeit respectable, characters whose emotions are largely glimpsed in traces of the utmost subtlety under grimly stoic exteriors, yet Anna Mougalis and Mads Mikkelsen prove easily up to the task as Chanel and Stravinsky. Both tremendously capable performers manage to convey so much through a frown, a stare, a wintry smile, that even their character development being reduced to vaguely disconnected actions (Stravinsky's starting the day with a grim routine of push-ups and drinking egg yolks, lying in leafy fields or slowing sinking into a bathtub; Chanel's energetically cutting open corsets, imperiously appraising her workers' nails or secretly, contemptuously donating to Stravinky's 'Rite of Spring' "for myself") seems to betray volumes of inner demons. Similarly, Yelena Morozova delivers an equally remarkable performance as Stravinsky's ill, haunted wife Katarina, her silently accusatory presence constantly looming to the forefront and serving as a constant reminder of the off centre moral core of the affair and wounded protagonists.

Mesmerizing, daringly sparse and elegant to a tee, Coco & Igor channels the poise and essence of a Chanel concoction at the cost of lacking somewhat of the innovative fury of a Stravinsky effort. While hardly the most informative in regards to the factual history of either character, Kounen's film proves more telling of the pain and passion of either figure than any factual account could be, ultimately proving a serenely audacious and ambiguously compelling success in the vein of either subject.

-8/10

Coco Chanel and Igor Stravinsky: A mixture of Chanel No. 5 and the music of Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring". It depicts a love story between two geniuses: madness, passion, pain and aesthetics. With her beauty and her deep voice, Anna Mouglalis embodies her character with grace and talent. She's truly sublime. The cast is very good, and it is beautifully filmed, full of gorgeous details. The historical reconstruction is also almost perfect.

Although this film is quite different from Kounen's previous movies, it is primarily a film which is qualitatively very solid. One of the most memorable sequences of the film is the moment when, after a short sequence introducing Coco Chanel, we watch the famous sequence of the Rite of Spring. Although you cannot compare Stravinsky with Kounen, this sequence refers in a way to the reaction he got with some of his previous films: adored by some and totally rejected by others. After this sequence, we enter directly in the plot that tightens the relationship between Coco Chanel and Igor Stravinsky. Through this story of feverish passion and this both intense and particular relationship, Kounen questions the turmoil of creation and thus plunges us into the intimacy of two of the most influential figures of their time, each being on the verge of achieving something extreme in their work (fashion/perfume, and avant-garde music). A very interesting film that demonstrate that Kounen has the ability to capture a new subject: not really a biopic, more a tale of an intense passion and confusion. The question remains whether this film is a parenthesis in his career or a new development.

According to some historians, the couturier Coco Chanel and the modernist composer Igor Stravinsky had a brief affair in the early 1920s. Stravinsky was married with a family while Coco was unattached. According to the scriptwriters their paths had crossed before, in 1913, when the "The Rite of Spring" a ballet by Diaghilev with music by Stravinsky opened in Paris, causing such a commotion that the police were called. Coco was one of the audience who liked the piece. Seven or so years later she invited Stravinsky and his family to live in her elegant suburban villa. Stravinsky's wife Katerina was suffering from TB. It's not long before he and Coco are making passionate love and not long after that the rest of the household twigs to what is going on. The affair does not last long though it impels Stravinsky to the completion of one of his major works. To him, charming and successful as she is, Coco is not an artist, merely a shopkeeper, and he does not dissent when Katerina points out Coco buys people.

Coco went on to make a fortune out of perfume as well as clothes and Stravinsky became a major 20th century composer. She seems to have gotten over Stravinsky fairly quickly and indeed continued to support (anonymously) his work. Stravinsky on the other hand seems to have been shaken to the core. He did, after all, have something to lose, whereas Coco was a free agent.

This production is all that you would expect from a European director – it is all beautifully framed and shot – Coco's own designs are much in evidence – and the story proceeds at a stately pace. As Stravinsky, Mads Mikkelsen, best known as a Bond villain in Casino Royale, is every inch the uptight Russian composer, while Anna Mougladis is rather enigmatic as Coco. She likes the music and likes to support artists, but just why she takes a liking to Stravinsky is not evident, unless you accept Katerina's view that she likes to buy pretty people as well as things. Here the film makers have given us a film of beauty, but one which does not explain itself. Nothing wrong with that, I suppose, we can all work out our own scenarios, but aesthetic considerations seldom amount to the full story.

Coco Chanel and Igor Stravinsky (2009)

It begins with the shocking (at the time) premier of the 1913 Russian composer Igor Stravinsky's great ballet, "Rite of Spring," that resulted in a minor riot in the theater (police were called, people were out of their seats and shouting). In a way, this recreation justifies the film right there--it's a bold and believable staging of the original, which has huge importance in the history of music and dance.

Then there is a party after the war, with typical early 1920s abandonment. A new era has arrived, and Stravinsky and Chanel meet.

The rest might seem to be history, but it's not. The whole rest of the film is really fiction, overall, a supposed affair between the two, and the supposed results of it in their work (Chanel No. 5 and some of Stravinsky's middle period works).

It's a slow unfolding, in part because there is little to work with. The first half hour is made up of just two scenes (the ballet and the party). Then there are mostly quiet and upscale domestic situations, some intimacies, some quiet times between. The period details are pretty wonderful, and the filming is respectfully beautiful, much like a Merchant Ivory film (which might be set in the same general period).

Acting? This is a puzzle. Both Chanel (French actress Ann Mouglalis) and Stravinsky (Danish actor Mads Mikkelsen) play everything with painful restraint. Who's to say exactly what these people were like, but surely the music is nothing if not crazy for the times (and beautifully crazy, for sure), and the fashions were nothing if not radical (and beautifully so)? But things develop as if everyone is psychotically shy and inhibited.

Most of you know there was another Coco Chanel movie released this same year, "Coco before Chanel," about the young woman's life before her fame, and in a way, the Coco there played by Audrey Tatou makes more sense. That movie was imperfect, too, and it might be said that between the two, a glimpse of the real woman might be possible, which is in a way remarkable enough. The addition of Stravinsky and his music is compelling on an artistic level, but not a dramatic one.

The movie, in its own way, tries to be romantically dramatic. The camera moves around people as they speak, and follows them into rooms and around corners. The music (mostly Stravinsky's) is vivid and rich (and Modern), and the sets are filled with plain old prettiness--wallpaper and light through doorways and a room full of flower petals (leading, we find out, to perfumes). It's all a great place to end up for an evening.

If only the company were more interested, and interesting.

This lugubrious exercise begins with the recreation of a spectacular event in the history of European modernism at which both famous subjects are present. It's the premiere of Stravinsky's Rites of Spring with choreography by Vaslaw Nijinsky, presented under the auspices of Sergey Pavlovich Diaghilev at the Theatre des Champs Élysées in Paris on May 29, 1913. It's a hot night: fans flutter in the audience. Gradually the public breaks out in shouting and argument. The house lights flash on and off. The gendarmes are called in. The evening is a disaster but an unforgettable one. Nijinsky's rhythmic, jerky choreography, performed by dancers in exaggerated makeup and peasant costumes, seen up close here, still seems barbaric and shocking. The music, as much as you can hear of it over the murmurs and shouting, is raucous and gorgeous. Unfortunately nothing else in the film is as exciting as this, or has one hundredth the historical significance. A little affair between two famous people, Igor at loose ends, and Coco still mourning the death of her great love and early sponsor, Arthur "Boy" Capel, this never adds up to much. Coco Chanel views the momentous 'Rite of Spring' performance with the expression the actress is to have throughout the running time: a cool half-smile plays over her lips.

She doesn't actually meet Stravinsky till seven years later, in 1920, when she invites him to come to live at her country villa-- with his tubercular wife and their bevy of young children (who are never individualized). He protests that he is self-supporting, but he's not doing particularly well, he's an exile, and he's living in hotels, so he gives in. Chanel offers him a large room with a piano to work in and comfortable bedrooms for his family. Eventually she also offers him her body.

Stravinsky's wife, who is constantly unwell (and has no eyebrows) and who has to put up with knowing this is going on, is never without a pained expression. Poor Katarina Stravinskaya (Elena Morozova)! We feel for her, but we don't like her. The Stravinsky's spread around Slavic-looking cloths and even a gilded Russian icon to make their surroundings homier. "Don't you like color?" the wife asks Coco during a tour of the house. "As long as it's black," she answers. Everything in Chanel's world is black and white. That should be a warning.

As we learn in a dutiful interlude in Grasse, the perfume-making center in the South of France, this was not only the year of the designer's affair with the Russian composer but also the one in which Chanel No.5 perfume was developed. Historically, that was an event of more significance.

There is too little dialogue in this film. The affair doesn't seem particularly passionate. Why was the Danish actor Mads Mikkelsen chosen for this role? Because he has thick lips like the real Stravinsky? Because he can speak Russian and play the piano? Or just because the Dutch-born French director Jan Kounen felt some affinity with him? He never seems to possess the energy of the real Stravinsky, and certainly lacks the wiry physique. He has been wonderful as a villain and a spy, but as a Russian musical genius and a lover, he's merely stolid and sad.

Or were he and Anna Mouglalis chosen because the film was done in English and French versions, and both could do that? The half-Greek, half-French Anna Mouglalis, with her husky voice, elegant face and long neck, is a high fashion presence. In fact she has been chosen elsewhere by Karl Lagerfeld, the present incarnation of the house of Chanel, as the official ambassador of Chanel perfume. She also played, briefly, the Fifties singer Juliette Greco, in the recent biopic about Serge Gainsbourg. Clearly she had Lagerfeld's blessing, and she's more chic than the sweet-faced Audrey Tautou of Amélie, who played the designer in this year's other, more entertaining, Chanel flick. But Mouglalis has just the one expression, the half smile. It's hardly surprising that there is no chemistry between the two actors.

And with the focus on visuals rather than words, you can only wonder where all this is going, what the point of it is. Partly, it's to show off the spectacular period interiors of Chanel's black and white deco villa, and a succession of striking outfits handsomely modeled by Mouglalis (all this doubtless supervised by the indefatigable Lagerfeld), prancing around her house, taking them off to have sex with poor old sweaty Igor, delivering imperious commands to underlings at her couture house, being driven around in her Rolls Royce convertible.

Day-to-day life at the villa is deadly. Madame Stravinsky admits that her husband's music is going well, but nobody seems to be having much fun. The adulterous couplings are perfunctory. The Stravinsky boys know they're going on. Everyone is polite but miserable. "Don't you feel guilty?" asks Katarina Stravinskaya. By now we know Chanel will answer with a quick, cool "No."

She feels something, though, because after it's over and she and Igor start criticizing each other, she boasting that she's "more successful" and he dismissing her as "a shopkeeper," Chanel goes to Diaghilev and gives him a large anonymous gift, "for the Rite." (The great impresario's campy gayness is mocked: just before Coco comes in, he's seen "interviewing" a potential "secretary" by having him strip.) Chanel's handsome gift is enough to fund the whole season. It allows the "Rite" to be staged again, to great acclaim this time, so that Le Sacre du printemps bookends the film, though we don't see it performed at the end, we only hear Igor drunkenly banging away at it on Chanel's piano, after his wife has gone off with the children. "Cheer up, Igor," Coco says, toasting him. What is he suffering from, exactly? Apparently that cinematic disease, Tortured Artist Syndrome. You will be well-advised to avoid this good-looking but otherwise empty film.