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An elegant, watchable period biopic with a strong lead performance and polished production design, but it often feels more interested in the men around Chanel than in her creative interior life. If you want a glossy costume drama about ambition and social ascent, it works; if you want a fuller portrait of Chanel… Read more
Where to watch: Buy
Wed · 1h 50m
Director: Anne Fontaine
Starring: Audrey Tautou, Benoît Poelvoorde, Alessandro Nivola
Several years after leaving the orphanage, to which her father never returned for her, Gabrielle Chanel finds herself working in a provincial bar. She's both a seamstress for the performers and a singer, earning the nickname Coco from the song she sings nightly with her sister. A liaison with Baron Balsan gives her an entree into French society and a chance to develop her gift for designing.
Anne Fontaine
Audrey Tautou, Benoît Poelvoorde, Alessandro Nivola
An elegant, watchable period biopic with a strong lead performance and polished production design, but it often feels more interested in the men around Chanel than in her creative interior life. If you want a glossy costume drama about ambition and social ascent, it works; if you want a fuller portrait of Chanel the designer and icon, it’s frustratingly thin.
Coco Before Chanel is a handsome, controlled biopic that traces Gabrielle Chanel’s rise from precarious beginnings to the threshold of fashion history. Anne Fontaine stages the film with a cool, polished surface, and Audrey Tautou gives Coco a watchful, self-possessed energy that keeps the film moving even when the script narrows its focus.
The problem is that the movie often treats Chanel less as a creative force than as an object moving through male attention and social opportunity. That choice gives the film a conventional romantic-drama shape, but it also blunts the sense of invention that should make the story electric.
What remains is a tasteful, occasionally absorbing portrait of class mobility, style, and self-invention. It’s strongest as atmosphere and performance piece, weaker as a definitive character study, and it leaves you wishing for a sharper, more daring film about the woman behind the legend.
Tatiana Sofia🧼 (2.5★) · 378 likes
How to make a film about a woman: - first, and this is mandatory, focus on the men on her life and forget complety to add deepness and truth into the female character - Second, well, if you have already talked about men you don't have to do anything more And then voilá!
Ingrid Atkinson (1.5★) · 269 likes
So are we just going to forget that Coco Chanel was a nazi or ?
chris (2★) · 263 likes
first hour of the movie: complete detail about her sex life last 10 minutes: literally everything else about her life i guess
Angelina (1★) · 121 likes
Ugh. This movie is infuriating!!! It is called "Coco before Chanel" NOT "The men of Coco". It literally jumped from Coco making hats to her having a whole ass collection. Not even a little bit on how she started! But what I hate the most is that they made it seem like Gabrielle had no passion for fashion. They made it look like she just had an eye/talent for fashion but she didn't really care. How do you even manage to do such a thing!!! UUUUGH
Asia the Invincible (3★) · 108 likes
A solid Audrey Tautou can't really make up for the fact that the film as a whole is more concerned with Coco's men than with her. Wasted potential, really.
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For viewers drawn to French period storytelling with emotional sweep and strong production design.
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female ambition, social mobility, fashion and style, class aspiration, self-invention, romantic entanglement, biographical drama, early 20th century Europe
period drama, biopic, fashion, class dynamics, female ambition, romance, prestige drama, early 1900s, costume design