Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months. So remarked Oscar Wilde, a century before the emergence of a split second consumer culture that renders computers and clothing obsolete almost immediately after production.
And yet the clothing line we see modeled at the end of the new biopic of Coco Chanel, “Coco Avant Chanel (Coco Before Chanel) could have featured on any catwalk today, despite occurring during Chanel’s early success in the 1920s.
The classic Chanel jacket, the tweed, the stripes. Today’s Chanel brand has milked the image of its founder and managed to corner the market on “classic, for styles that were once cutting-edge.
One wonders how much the brand Chanel S.A. paid the film’s producer Caroline Benjo. The French production – which opens tonight as part of the European Film Panorama – feels rather like the new ad for Chanel No.5 perfume, wherein the new face of Chanel, Audrey Tautou, enacts the traveler’s fantasy of encountering a handsome stranger on a train. The film and ad were released concurrently.
Chanel S.A. knows it will benefit from a major motion picture publicizing their founder. According to the interpretation of director Anne Fontaine, as well as Miss Tatou herself, Coco is a figure to be worshipped. An icon in the religious sense: beautiful, simple, lifeless.
The audience is given minimal access to her character. We admire Tautou’s features, we esteem her for championing the cause of feminism in liberalizing women’s apparel, we approve of her independent mind because they all fit into broader narratives that we have been taught to respect. Coco the icon is as familiar, classic and appealing as her brand currently strives to be.
But it is a reverse iconization. Coco as a psyche had issues, Coco as a woman had history, Coco as a historic figure had skeletons in her closet known to everyone of her era. Accused of offenses from lesbianism to involvement with the Nazis, Coco was not icon material. Idol, perhaps, icon, no.
The film and the brand take advantage of the passage of time to rewrite her history. A new generation of Chanel customers is ready to rally around a symbol that is far easier to digest than the grande dame herself. (Her alleged involvement with Nazis caused her French customers to desert her entirely in the 1940s, although the Americans and Brits proved less ethically fastidious in their sartorial selection.)
Today’s blissfully ignorant viewers have probably not seen the TV film starring Shirley MacClaine that was released last year and featured Miss Chanel as an aging woman coping with the weighty fullness of her life. Nor the 1981 film entitled “Chanel Solitaire. Or if they have, they may prefer this new Coco; she is young and lovely, she is familiar, she is ready for purchase and prêt a porter.
The film that Fontaine has fashioned is (appropriately) aesthetically appealing. Motifs abound, such as the various carriages and early automobiles that accompany and come to signify Coco’s life transitions.
Catherine Leterrier’s scrupulously executed costuming and Oliveir Radot’s turn-of-the-century details deliver a pleasingly adroit period piece. Such cinematic delicacies almost convince the viewer they’re not watching one long Chanel commercial.
Yet with such an obviously careful tailor as Fontaine, one begins to wonder if the fault is not with the material herself, that is, Miss Tautou.
Repeated frames seem intended to convey Coco as a deep and thoughtful personality: the huge dark eyes of little girl watching her father’s carriage drive out of her life forever, sitting on her bed gathering her courage to take her life in a new direction, lying under a tree lost in reverie.
Tautou’s cheekbones are so pretty and her eyes so deep we complacently imagine intense character development has gone on behind them, and should Miss Tautou be required to prove it, we would see the vastness of Coco’s character played out upon that delicate frame. But luckily for both Coco and Audrey, she’s never required to do so.
This may not be entirely her fault. But we should not forget that Tautou is the new face of the Chanel brand, so flexing her not insignificant acting muscles may simply have not been her objective for this role.
She is as interested as Chanel S.A. in perpetuating (or creating) “Coco the Icon as played by Audrey Tautou. And so the audience murmurs, along with her future lover Boy Capel, played by Alessandro Nivola, “Vous etes elegante (You are elegant). There is not much else to say.
Watching from the perspective of an American in Cairo, the film’s alignment with the broad narrative of European female empowerment is hard to ignore.
Coco’s attempt to evade the power of men over her life by dressing like a man, and her imitation of masculine fashions in the clothing she designs feel self-evident to a European or American viewer. As inevitable as evolution from ape to human, (another belief cherished by the same members of the liberal West that trumpet women’s rights), women’s clothing evolved from constraining corsets and excessive decoration to more comfortable and practical wear.
As Westerners, we are taught that the “equal status of Western women is the final stage in female evolution. This narrative is so engrained as to need no qualification for a French or American viewer, the film’s most likely audience.
However, seen in Egypt, I wonder what would happen if a young lower-class Egyptian woman dressed like a man. She’d likely provoke similar levels of contention as Coco Chanel herself. The film’s depiction of Coco’s innovation shows a pawn carrying out a wider social transition in female empowerment that would have occurred anyway.
But evolution is not a linear process driven with an end already in mind. What now feels like the inevitable final stage for Western women – a status in which she enjoys personal freedoms in choosing her dress and profession, yet cannot expect to achieve a monetary or professional position on par with her male equivalent – results from specific events and actions that were by no means predetermined.
In her own words, Coco Chanel declared “I gave women a sense of freedom; I gave them back their bodies: bodies that were drenched in sweat, due to fashion’s finery, lace, corsets, underclothes, padding. She knew what she was doing.
The film appears to champion women’s independence by depicting an older unenlightened world where Coco has to sleep with an aristocrat for the chance to audition. Coco’s stellar success as an independent unmarried woman seems to imply that we now live in a world where no young women sleep with powerful men to get what they want.
Although attempting to portray a global icon within a global feminist narrative of emancipation, the film betrays its own intentions with that final scene. As the clothing intended to carry women into a brighter future appeals to today’s consumer and her appetite for a “classic look from an older time, a jacket that will remain perennially in style, and an icon that will now endure unsullied.
“Coco avant Chanel is showing tonight, 9:30 pm, at CityStars cinema.
