Coco Before Chanel

Directed by Anne Fontaine

(Not Rated)

**

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A look at Coco Chanel’s humble beginnings

Coco Chanel was a “thrillingly atypical, genuinely complicated heroine,” said Karina Longworth in Time Out New York. It’s a shame that Coco Before Chanel—Anne Fontaine’s origin story about the famed French couturier—fails to live up to the legend she left behind. An orphan, Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel (Audrey Tatou) started out working as a seamstress by day and a cabaret singer by night. Eventually, she worked her way up through society’s strata to become a 20th-century style icon. Fontaine at least deserves credit for attempting to tell Chanel’s story, said Kenneth Turan in the Los Angeles Times. The director “brings intelligence, restraint, and style” to what could have been a standard biography, and Tatou “inhabits the role” with subtle conviction and “relentless intelligence.” But too much of the film could “exist without the Chanel name and still smell like the same perfume,” said Scott Tobias in The Onion. Coco Before Chanel doesn’t capture what made Chanel so different: Her modern, masculine take on design freed generations of women from the restraints of corsets and flounce.