Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky

Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky is a gorgeous production that will be a delight for lovers of period costume design and art direction, particularly in the Art Deco style. It is much less convincing dramatically. This is surprising as the script by Chris Greenhalgh is based on his own 2002 novel, "Coco & Igor". However the subject may have been  handled in the novel, the problem with this adaptation appears to be a poor fit between style and substance. As this might be also a summary of the flaw in the relationship between its two protagonists, it is ironic that Jan Kounen has been unable to master it as director. He has however overwhelmingly committed himself to surface and the result, arguably like the Art Deco style itself, of which Coco Chanel is the embodiment, is a coldly elegant affair

The film begins in Paris, 1913 when budding designer Chanel attends the first, scandalous performance of  Stravinsky’s “The Rite of Spring”, produced by Diaghilev and performed by Les Ballet Russes. The avant-garde work so outraged the audience that a riot ensued. Scroll forward seven years when the two finally talents meet. Stravinsky, now artistically vindicated, has fled the Bolsheviks whilst Chanel, now très chic, is mourning her lover, Arthur "Boy" Capel who had been killed in a car accident the year before. Sparks fly, he attracted by her success, she by his artistic bona fides and she invites him to live in her villa outside Paris, along with his consumptive wife (Elena Morozova) and children. They begin an affair under the wife’s nose, he composing with vigor while she creates Chanel No. 5.

Let’s acknowledge that Greenhalgh’s story is, at least as far as I know, a fabrication. All the more reason why this film should have been a lot better than it is, as it could have had the characters say and do anything that suited the dramatic requirements. Yet very little comes from the characters themselves, who remain largely circumscribed by Kounen’s direction. Chanel’s glamorous world is evident enough to seduce Stravinsky into an affair but for the amour fou which is supposed to bind the composer to the couturier and which causes him to humiliate and eventually abandon his wife and family, something more is required than what we see.  But a commonality on a psychological, moral or artistic level between the pair is not apparent. Performatively Kounen, keeps Mouglalis and Mikkelsen constrained in this respect, their interactions largely limited to bumping and grinding and tinkling the ivories, the black and white pattern of which no doubt appealed to Coco. Only Stravinsky's wife, Yelena, really gets to enunciate her point of view but she is decidedly marginal to the main event.

Chanel is portrayed as a predatory female, a designer in more sense than one, a collector of male scalps rather than an artist’s muse (perhaps not unfairly as she had many famous lovers as well as during WWII, a German intelligence officer, a mis-judgement which required her to leave France at the close of the war only to return in 1953) or even a passionate patron or artist manqué. One can't help but feel there was more driving her attraction to the composer (by the bye, in real life Stravinsky looked like a owlish university professor, not Mikkelsen’s deadly good-looking Slav). Yet whilst we see Stravinsky, the artist, at work, and of course, hear his music, Chanel is depicted simply as a fashionista (at one point Stravinsky articulates the difference by saying to her [sic] "You are not an artist, you are a shop keeper"). There is a brief moment when we see her shuffling a few drawings around but that's as close as we get to her creative force which, let's face it, was not only revolutionary in its day but has retained an iconic status that Stravinsky's music, at least beyond very circumscribed circles, has not.

At a thematic level the film touches on some intriguing questions, such as whether creative individuals are bound by the same moral strictures as ordinary mortals, of the relationship between style and art, between art and life and so on, but they are not embodied in the words and actions of the characters. The result is a film which although marvellous to look at is over-controlled and thus ultimately unengaging.

FYI: Make sure that you stay to the very end of the credits, at which time you will be treated to an enigmatic coda.

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