Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky

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: 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.

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.

Anyone who presumed that this film would be a follow-on from 'Coco before Chanel', Anne Fontaine's endearing, rags-to-riches depiction of Gabrielle 'Coco' Chanel, would be mistaken. This film is director Jan Kounen's attempt to portray Coco how she really was: a mean-spirited, conceited femme fatale.

Only the avant-garde artistry of Igor Stravinsky's music is enough to mollify Coco (Anna Mouglalis). The Russian composer's controversial work repels most for being too audacious and violent, but it entrances her, and after the Russian revolution leaves Igor and his family penniless, Coco invites them to live with her. Igor accepts and thus begins a cataclysmic affair.

What begins as a 'Remains of the Day'-type attraction – where Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson were at pains to disclose their true feelings for each other and could only do so through knowing glances – very quickly descends into a sex-crazed love affair rivalling the one in 'Last Tango in Paris'.

A subject you can usually trust French filmmakers with, however, what's missing from the plentiful love scenes between the two is, frankly, love. In fact, their entire relationship is rather curious. It's redolent of the relationship a drug addict has with drugs: It's the feeling the substance gives that's sacrosanct, not the substance itself.

I was unmoved by what I believed should have been an intense performance for the part of Igor (Mads Mikkelsen). It is staid and lacklustre, interrupted by the occasional paroxysm when he is writing or playing music. The filming of Stravinsky's seminal piece, 'The Rite of Spring' in the grand Champs-Élysées theatre (as in actuality) is very impressive: the suspense, drama and sheer creepiness convince you that you are seeing the spectacle for real.

It may be reasonably assumed that Coco was purely a product of her insular background - provincial, orphaned, raised by nuns - but she is never worthy of pity. The only person who deserves this is Igor's wife, Katherine (Yelena Morozova). Her characterisation of a powerless woman who sees her husband slip away from her inch by inch is so full of pathos that it leaves you contemplating whether to buy a bottle of Chanel No. 5 ever again.

For all her brutality, though, there's a wonderfully dainty scene where she formulates her signature fragrance. As with everything else, she's very pernickety and it's only after playing Goldilocks that she arrives at the correct blend of the 80 ingredients.

Asked if she ever felt guilty for her deeds, Coco simply says 'No' unbearably cavalierly, which left me wondering: If she never had any humanity for herself, why should we have any for her?

www.scottishreview.net

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