Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky

If you think Audrey Tautou's Coco in Coco before Chanel is a restrained performance, Anna Mouglalis' Coco in Coco Chanel and Igor Stravinsky will seem downright glacial. But not cold in a romantic sense, just careful and controlled as you might expect from the iconic head of a fashion house and perfume.

Then again, Stravinsky, despite his iconoclastic Rite of Spring presented in its disturbing debut, is almost as glacial and controlling as Coco. Their love scenes are pretty as a picture, yet that's the point—they are a metaphor for the detached heroes playing at love. The film is inaccessible if you want to experience the subjects' passions in depth but satisfying if you wish to see the sacrifice these 20th-century monuments made in their personal lives for their creations.

The real strength of this biopic is in the production design and cinematography, a triumph of black and white idolatry in a muted color envelope. The architectural rendering of Coco's obsession with black and white, right down to white doors with black borders, is unforgettable, making Igor's tight fitting clothes and equally stiff glasses counterpoint to the elegantly reserved Coco. The estate, autos, and concert scenes are so realistically wrought as to make you think you were there.

The third act is a disappointment despite attempts to connect the heroes with their elder years. Well, maybe that's the point—cold is a cold does, tribal, pagan rites don't always end up well with cold monochromatic passion. However, the film manages to make it all seductive.

It's not easy to enter this closed world of fashion and composition—Igor's wife Katarina (Elena Morozova) and her children are mere accessories in the tight drama between Coco and Igor. However, the principals are so carefully controlled that even we the film spectators are outsiders

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

This film is about the famous fashion designer Coco Chanel, and her attraction to the Russian musician Igor Stravinsky.

"Chanel Coco & Igor Stravinsky" has beautiful classical music, thoughtful cinematography and great atmosphere, but unfortunately there is not much story to fill the film. The pacing is dead slow, probably to stretch it to 2 hours. I find the passion between Coco an Igor not enough, and the jealousy and rivalry between Coco and Katarina not intense enough.

In the end, the film cuts suddenly into the future then back to 1920, which is confusing. In addition, the ending does not bring so much closure to the story, it would have been good to generously reduce the existing footage and expand on what happens between the two time frames. Though the film is not boring, it is dull and lacking in passion.

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.

Anna Mouglalis is very thin, Mads Mikkelsen has wonderful cheekbones and they do not convince me that they are playing Coco Chanel and Igor Stravinsky respectively. The other actors, with the exception of Grigori Manukov as Diaghilev, left no impression on me at all. Surely Chanel had more passion, more anger in her than we see in Mouglalis; surely Stravinsky made more attempts to assert himself with the domineering Chanel than Mikkelsen does here.

I was left with a great regret that the great masters of cinema have gone, the directors that were able to fashion material like this into art: Visconti, Losey, Ophuls.