Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky

If you think Audrey Tautou's Coco in Coco before Chanel is a restrained performance, Anna Mouglalis' Coco in Coco Chanel and Igor Stravinsky will seem downright glacial. But not cold in a romantic sense, just careful and controlled as you might expect from the iconic head of a fashion house and perfume.

Then again, Stravinsky, despite his iconoclastic Rite of Spring presented in its disturbing debut, is almost as glacial and controlling as Coco. Their love scenes are pretty as a picture, yet that's the point—they are a metaphor for the detached heroes playing at love. The film is inaccessible if you want to experience the subjects' passions in depth but satisfying if you wish to see the sacrifice these 20th-century monuments made in their personal lives for their creations.

The real strength of this biopic is in the production design and cinematography, a triumph of black and white idolatry in a muted color envelope. The architectural rendering of Coco's obsession with black and white, right down to white doors with black borders, is unforgettable, making Igor's tight fitting clothes and equally stiff glasses counterpoint to the elegantly reserved Coco. The estate, autos, and concert scenes are so realistically wrought as to make you think you were there.

The third act is a disappointment despite attempts to connect the heroes with their elder years. Well, maybe that's the point—cold is a cold does, tribal, pagan rites don't always end up well with cold monochromatic passion. However, the film manages to make it all seductive.

It's not easy to enter this closed world of fashion and composition—Igor's wife Katarina (Elena Morozova) and her children are mere accessories in the tight drama between Coco and Igor. However, the principals are so carefully controlled that even we the film spectators are outsiders

Coco Chanel and Igor Stravinsky (2009)

It begins with the shocking (at the time) premier of the 1913 Russian composer Igor Stravinsky's great ballet, "Rite of Spring," that resulted in a minor riot in the theater (police were called, people were out of their seats and shouting). In a way, this recreation justifies the film right there--it's a bold and believable staging of the original, which has huge importance in the history of music and dance.

Then there is a party after the war, with typical early 1920s abandonment. A new era has arrived, and Stravinsky and Chanel meet.

The rest might seem to be history, but it's not. The whole rest of the film is really fiction, overall, a supposed affair between the two, and the supposed results of it in their work (Chanel No. 5 and some of Stravinsky's middle period works).

It's a slow unfolding, in part because there is little to work with. The first half hour is made up of just two scenes (the ballet and the party). Then there are mostly quiet and upscale domestic situations, some intimacies, some quiet times between. The period details are pretty wonderful, and the filming is respectfully beautiful, much like a Merchant Ivory film (which might be set in the same general period).

Acting? This is a puzzle. Both Chanel (French actress Ann Mouglalis) and Stravinsky (Danish actor Mads Mikkelsen) play everything with painful restraint. Who's to say exactly what these people were like, but surely the music is nothing if not crazy for the times (and beautifully crazy, for sure), and the fashions were nothing if not radical (and beautifully so)? But things develop as if everyone is psychotically shy and inhibited.

Most of you know there was another Coco Chanel movie released this same year, "Coco before Chanel," about the young woman's life before her fame, and in a way, the Coco there played by Audrey Tatou makes more sense. That movie was imperfect, too, and it might be said that between the two, a glimpse of the real woman might be possible, which is in a way remarkable enough. The addition of Stravinsky and his music is compelling on an artistic level, but not a dramatic one.

The movie, in its own way, tries to be romantically dramatic. The camera moves around people as they speak, and follows them into rooms and around corners. The music (mostly Stravinsky's) is vivid and rich (and Modern), and the sets are filled with plain old prettiness--wallpaper and light through doorways and a room full of flower petals (leading, we find out, to perfumes). It's all a great place to end up for an evening.

If only the company were more interested, and interesting.

This film is about the famous fashion designer Coco Chanel, and her attraction to the Russian musician Igor Stravinsky.

"Chanel Coco & Igor Stravinsky" has beautiful classical music, thoughtful cinematography and great atmosphere, but unfortunately there is not much story to fill the film. The pacing is dead slow, probably to stretch it to 2 hours. I find the passion between Coco an Igor not enough, and the jealousy and rivalry between Coco and Katarina not intense enough.

In the end, the film cuts suddenly into the future then back to 1920, which is confusing. In addition, the ending does not bring so much closure to the story, it would have been good to generously reduce the existing footage and expand on what happens between the two time frames. Though the film is not boring, it is dull and lacking in passion.

Anna Mouglalis is very thin, Mads Mikkelsen has wonderful cheekbones and they do not convince me that they are playing Coco Chanel and Igor Stravinsky respectively. The other actors, with the exception of Grigori Manukov as Diaghilev, left no impression on me at all. Surely Chanel had more passion, more anger in her than we see in Mouglalis; surely Stravinsky made more attempts to assert himself with the domineering Chanel than Mikkelsen does here.

I was left with a great regret that the great masters of cinema have gone, the directors that were able to fashion material like this into art: Visconti, Losey, Ophuls.

To say a film is strikingly subtle may sound somewhat counterintuitive, yet director Jan Kounen's Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky abounds with such precarious artistic contradictions and exploits them with impressive ease. In fact, it seems hardly accidental that Kounen's chosen tone and aesthetic are not far removed from those of Chanel herself: serene, impeccably beautiful, yet with more than a dash of icy aloofness, with a creeping pace and lengthy silent interludes often occupied by nothing more than characters staring with vaguely furrowed brows. Yet in many ways such stillness and silence serve to articulate volumes about the titular characters, the ambiguity of such an approach allowing the viewer to 'fill in the gaps' and piece together the mystery of the characters in the same way they are prompted to envision almost all narrative context.

Kounen's film could hardly be less typical as a biopic in the sense that it eschews any exposition whatsoever, forcing the viewer to independently pursue the cause for Stravinsky's banishment from Russia, Gabrielle Chanel's establishment as an independent fashion designer or the significance of almost every other character in the film – a risky touch which ultimately proves beneficial, adding a more interactive element to the narrative and ultimately trimming all extraneous content to instead dwell on the central emotional arc. Apart from an arresting and mesmerizing 15 minute opening performance of Stravinsky's abrasively modern 'Rite of Spring' ballet and the audience's subsequent cataclysmic uproar, Coco & Igor proves aptly titled, its scope boldly remains one of proximity and intimacy throughout. Concentrating on the passionate affair between the two creative icons, their mutual inspiration and the eventual unravelling of both, Kounen leaves exterior concerns such as the mutual cultural significance of both central characters largely left to the audience to supply, apart from precisely placed thematic nuggets (when Chanel, in a dispute with Stravinsky, articulates her having more money and fame than Stravinsky, the composer spits back "You are not an artist Coco – you are 'une vendeuse de tissues'" – a line whose English translation as 'shopkeep' loses an enormous amount of its acidic contempt).

That said, for a film that skims to the bare essentials of story, Kounen's editing could hardly demonstrate a more contrary knack for distilling. With cameras consistently gliding slowly across empty halls, up winding stairwells or past brooding characters, the film's hypnotic slowness and cloistered atmosphere is executed with a largely elegant flair, but with a pace so sluggish it threatens to become still photography on numerous occasions, such an approach feels undeniably excessive and unnecessarily restrained (the film's ending scenes, in particular, are agonizingly slow). Although Kounen's brilliant use of the staggeringly beautiful and concussively powerful music by Stravinsky helps inspire the film with passion and the few yet extensive sex scenes do breathe some well needed fire and rawness into the film, there does remain a sense of corseted formality throughout which detracts from the film's engagement factor, capturing the stiffness of a traditional biography in lieu of its inundation of facts.

It is a taxing job indeed to retain audience interest through two largely unlikeable, albeit respectable, characters whose emotions are largely glimpsed in traces of the utmost subtlety under grimly stoic exteriors, yet Anna Mougalis and Mads Mikkelsen prove easily up to the task as Chanel and Stravinsky. Both tremendously capable performers manage to convey so much through a frown, a stare, a wintry smile, that even their character development being reduced to vaguely disconnected actions (Stravinsky's starting the day with a grim routine of push-ups and drinking egg yolks, lying in leafy fields or slowing sinking into a bathtub; Chanel's energetically cutting open corsets, imperiously appraising her workers' nails or secretly, contemptuously donating to Stravinky's 'Rite of Spring' "for myself") seems to betray volumes of inner demons. Similarly, Yelena Morozova delivers an equally remarkable performance as Stravinsky's ill, haunted wife Katarina, her silently accusatory presence constantly looming to the forefront and serving as a constant reminder of the off centre moral core of the affair and wounded protagonists.

Mesmerizing, daringly sparse and elegant to a tee, Coco & Igor channels the poise and essence of a Chanel concoction at the cost of lacking somewhat of the innovative fury of a Stravinsky effort. While hardly the most informative in regards to the factual history of either character, Kounen's film proves more telling of the pain and passion of either figure than any factual account could be, ultimately proving a serenely audacious and ambiguously compelling success in the vein of either subject.

-8/10