Coco Before Chanel (2009)

Anne Fontaine's Coco Before Chanel arrives in 2009 with the sober determination of a woman who has already decided how the story ends. We open in 1893 at an orphanage in Aubazine, where a father deposits two small girls and vanishes into the American unknown. Fifteen years later Gabrielle (Audrey Tautou) is sewing costumes by day and singing a song about a lost dog by night, which is how she acquires the nickname that will eventually be stitched onto a great deal of merchandise. The film is patient, tasteful, and largely uninterested in spectacle. It wants us to watch a woman assemble herself from available scraps.

The engine here is independence, and it runs hot. Gabrielle declines to be mistaken for the women who sell themselves in the back room. She declines a marriage proposal from the baron who keeps her. She declines, most emphatically, the loan guarantee offered by her English lover, insisting on facing the banker alone. Her designs discard the corset, shorten the skirt, and put women in trousers they can actually ride in. This is a portrait of self-determination rendered in fabric, and it is the film's most persuasive argument. The representation of a complicated historical woman is welcome, though the film stops short of asking what her success cost anyone else.

Elsewhere the ledger comes up thin. The cabaret's sapphic possibilities go unexplored. The environment is scenery. Body image is not a subject, and neither is the interior life of a mind that works differently. The critique of wealth extends as far as observing that rich men can be disappointing. History is lightly rearranged, not boldly rewritten, and the film lectures only rarely, preferring mood to sermon. It is handsome, melancholy, and faintly airless. We are asked to admire a woman who refused to be owned. We are not asked to think about much else.