The Times seems to be on a Coco binge today...
Audrey Tautou and Anna Mouglalis star as Coco Chanel
Fashion icon and designer is to be played by both Anna Mouglalis and Audrey Tautou while Shirley MacLaine took US TV role
She glides on the arm of a tail-coated swain into an elegant belle époque salon. Music swirls, eyes swivel — and no wonder. Her thin black dress hugs a gamine frame, a look of masculine confidence rests on her face. Gabrielle Bonheur Chanel, better known as Coco, is making an entrance.
It’s not her only one today — through a crowded maze of extras, crew, stylists and film-set gofers — or, indeed, on other days. Coco Chanel is making a lot of entrances on film at the moment. Last year, I visited the set of Chanel & Stravinsky, five minutes’ walk from the Gare du Nord, to see the rising French star Anna Mouglalis as Coco opposite the Danish Bond villain Mads Mikkelsen. However, this is just one of three on-screen incarnations of the distinguished designer. There is also Coco Avant Chanel on the way this summer, a lavish confection starring Audrey Tautou, and last year both French films were preceded by the American television mini-series Coco Chanel, for which Shirley MacLaine barked and purred and received a Golden Globe nomination.
It doesn’t even stop there. Until recently, there were at least two other Chanel film projects on the go. One was to be written and directed by the French veteran Danièle Thompson, while an American version was rumoured to be starring that noted demimondaine Demi Moore. (There will also be a book on Chanel from Justine Picardie in the autumn.) Not all of these could possibly have reached fruition; there will be no Chanel film No 5, or, indeed, four. But three finished dramas on one woman, however celebrated, seems excuse enough to ask the question: what on earth is going on? One possible answer is that these are just London buses. Films sometimes come along in twos and threes because film-makers often think along uncannily similar lines. Look at Truman Capote, the recent subject of a pair of more or less identical screenplays. And history does have a habit of coughing up figures who repeatedly stir the creative juices. This is usually because there’s an insoluble riddle at the heart of their story. Take the civilised Nazi Albert Speer, or the tragic Indian mathematician Ramanujan, or the vanishing yachtsman Donald Crowhurst — dramatists keep coming back to the well because, in each case, there’s no getting to the bottom.
It could be that Chanel belongs in this gallery thanks to the distinctly colourful company she kept. Her brief dalliance with an aesthetic co-revolutionary in Paris, in 1920, is dramatised in Chanel & Stravinsky. She was also pals with Cocteau, Picasso and Chaplin, and spent the war in occupied Paris under the protection of a Nazi officer. It was only thanks to her connections in the highest reaches of the British establishment that got her off the hook, and only in the 1950s that she dared return from Swiss exile. Good material for a drama, surely? Well, yes, except that none of these films goes anywhere near her war record. It’s not an easy slip to explain in a heroine. The French remain squeamish about stories that shine a light on wartime collaboration, but even the MacLaine mini-series on the Lifetime Network, with no French involvement, contrived not to mention the war.
The fascination of her early years helps to explain Chanel’s appearance on screen. It boils down to two words: Edith Piaf. Marion Cotillard’s Oscar-winning turn in 2007’s La Vie en Rose “opened the idea of a biopic in France”, explains Anne Fontaine, director and co-writer of Coco Avant Chanel. “The biopic is not a very French tradition, but Chanel is one of the best-known French figures in the world, and I was astonished someone hadn’t done a film on her before.”
As dramatised in Coco Avant Chanel, the designer, like Piaf, had a troubled youth, out of which she battled by sheer force of personality. Her mother died when she was 12, her father disappeared to America in search of work, and she spent the next seven years in an orphanage run by nuns. As with La Vie en Rose, the film will shine a bright light onto a past the facts of which are not widely known. Edmonde Charles-Roux’s biography, the bible of Chanel studies, explained how the facts of her youth were blurred by a clerical error at her birth in 1883, when a clerk was left to guess that her surname was spelt “Chasnel”. But Chanel also abetted in the creation of her own myth by changing her birth date to 1893.
Although the nuns taught her to sew, it was the stage that originally attracted her. Like Piaf, she picked up a nickname there, from singing Ko Ko Ri Ko. Coco Avant Chanel concentrates on the two affairs that changed her destiny. The first was with Etienne Balsan, a rich aristocrat in whose chateau, explains Fontaine, “she discovers how privileged women of the era dress, and where she invents the very practical clothes that come from riding on horses and running in the fields”. She then fell in love with the young English blade “Boy” Capel, who supported her early in her career but whom she refused to marry until she could pay off her debts to him. As the film hints, her dedication to her career would leave no room for marriage or children.
Capel, who married an English aristocrat and broke her heart, before dying in 1919, also appears at the start of Chanel & Stravinsky, when the heroine attends her first classical concert. It just happens to be the riotous premiere of Le Sacre du Printemps in 1913. The idea that Chanel could claim equal billing with classical music’s first great iconoclastic modernist was first posited by Chris Greenhalgh in his novel Coco and Igor, on which the film is based. Both book and screenplay pinpoint 1920 as the year of Chanel’s efflorescence and attribute it in part to the influence of Stravinsky’s guiding revolutionary spirit. “Designers were second-class citizens for a long time,” Greenhalgh explains. “In the novel and the screenplay, when Stravinsky and Chanel have a fight, she says, ‘I’m just as smart as you. And as much of an artist.’ He says, ‘You’re not an artist, Coco. You’re a shopkeeper.’ It’s perhaps a reflection of the increasing power and significance of women that we’re finally appreciating what she did for them.”
Greenhalgh’s 2002 novel was not the first effort to put the story of Chanel’s liberation of women from the corset at the heart of a fiction. Before her death in 1971, Chanel was able to witness her transmogrification into a musical. Alan Jay Lerner and André Previn collaborated on Coco in 1969. Chanel was delighted to discover she would be played by a Hepburn; less so when she found out she would be embodied not, as she assumed, by the clotheshorse Audrey but by the battle-axe Katharine. The show ran on Broadway for more than 300 performances. If Chanel goes on to prosper in the cinema, don’t back against the musical making a return (like Pam Gems’s Piaf, recently revived).
There was a ring of truth to the casting of the less sylphlike Hepburn. The consensus is that Chanel had the hide of a rhinoceros. “She was tough and quite cold,” says Jan Kounen, the director of Chanel & Stravinsky. “She was a bit of a tyrant,” says Mouglalis. “She built an empire at a time when women were not working at all. She was a fighter all her life. She was angry about centuries of lack of education for girls and wanted to change that. I think she hated women, because she wanted things to change quickly — and women were going for the dresses, not the way of life.”
Rake-thin and with the baritone voice of a seasoned smoker, Mouglalis is ideal casting. They obviously thought so at the Lifetime Network, because she was offered the part of the young Coco for the mini-series before it went to the Slovak actress Barbora Bobulova. For her part, Fontaine was not prepared to proceed with Coco Avant Chanel until she found the right actress. “If I hadn’t had Audrey Tautou, I don’t think I would have developed the project because I needed an ideal interpreter to play Chanel. You can’t imitate her. You have to have the bodily proportions. If she’s too big, it won’t work. If she’s too round, it won’t work, either.”
In the spirit of pre-match sparring, Coco Avant Chanel’s publicity campaign is putting it about that its film is the one officially recognised by the House of Chanel. In reality, Karl Lagerfeld, chief designer of Chanel since 1983, has looked supportively on both productions, supplying access to designs and drawings (though not much exists from 1920). His recent collection opened with a short black-and-white silent film called Paris-Moscou: the house’s connection with Russian culture is clearly not one he repudiates. Just don’t expect him to produce a film entitled Paris-Berlin. However many times they dramatise the life of Coco Chanel, some things remain unsayable.
Audrey Tautou and Anna Mouglalis star as Coco Chanel
Fashion icon and designer is to be played by both Anna Mouglalis and Audrey Tautou while Shirley MacLaine took US TV role
She glides on the arm of a tail-coated swain into an elegant belle époque salon. Music swirls, eyes swivel — and no wonder. Her thin black dress hugs a gamine frame, a look of masculine confidence rests on her face. Gabrielle Bonheur Chanel, better known as Coco, is making an entrance.
It’s not her only one today — through a crowded maze of extras, crew, stylists and film-set gofers — or, indeed, on other days. Coco Chanel is making a lot of entrances on film at the moment. Last year, I visited the set of Chanel & Stravinsky, five minutes’ walk from the Gare du Nord, to see the rising French star Anna Mouglalis as Coco opposite the Danish Bond villain Mads Mikkelsen. However, this is just one of three on-screen incarnations of the distinguished designer. There is also Coco Avant Chanel on the way this summer, a lavish confection starring Audrey Tautou, and last year both French films were preceded by the American television mini-series Coco Chanel, for which Shirley MacLaine barked and purred and received a Golden Globe nomination.
It doesn’t even stop there. Until recently, there were at least two other Chanel film projects on the go. One was to be written and directed by the French veteran Danièle Thompson, while an American version was rumoured to be starring that noted demimondaine Demi Moore. (There will also be a book on Chanel from Justine Picardie in the autumn.) Not all of these could possibly have reached fruition; there will be no Chanel film No 5, or, indeed, four. But three finished dramas on one woman, however celebrated, seems excuse enough to ask the question: what on earth is going on? One possible answer is that these are just London buses. Films sometimes come along in twos and threes because film-makers often think along uncannily similar lines. Look at Truman Capote, the recent subject of a pair of more or less identical screenplays. And history does have a habit of coughing up figures who repeatedly stir the creative juices. This is usually because there’s an insoluble riddle at the heart of their story. Take the civilised Nazi Albert Speer, or the tragic Indian mathematician Ramanujan, or the vanishing yachtsman Donald Crowhurst — dramatists keep coming back to the well because, in each case, there’s no getting to the bottom.
It could be that Chanel belongs in this gallery thanks to the distinctly colourful company she kept. Her brief dalliance with an aesthetic co-revolutionary in Paris, in 1920, is dramatised in Chanel & Stravinsky. She was also pals with Cocteau, Picasso and Chaplin, and spent the war in occupied Paris under the protection of a Nazi officer. It was only thanks to her connections in the highest reaches of the British establishment that got her off the hook, and only in the 1950s that she dared return from Swiss exile. Good material for a drama, surely? Well, yes, except that none of these films goes anywhere near her war record. It’s not an easy slip to explain in a heroine. The French remain squeamish about stories that shine a light on wartime collaboration, but even the MacLaine mini-series on the Lifetime Network, with no French involvement, contrived not to mention the war.
The fascination of her early years helps to explain Chanel’s appearance on screen. It boils down to two words: Edith Piaf. Marion Cotillard’s Oscar-winning turn in 2007’s La Vie en Rose “opened the idea of a biopic in France”, explains Anne Fontaine, director and co-writer of Coco Avant Chanel. “The biopic is not a very French tradition, but Chanel is one of the best-known French figures in the world, and I was astonished someone hadn’t done a film on her before.”
As dramatised in Coco Avant Chanel, the designer, like Piaf, had a troubled youth, out of which she battled by sheer force of personality. Her mother died when she was 12, her father disappeared to America in search of work, and she spent the next seven years in an orphanage run by nuns. As with La Vie en Rose, the film will shine a bright light onto a past the facts of which are not widely known. Edmonde Charles-Roux’s biography, the bible of Chanel studies, explained how the facts of her youth were blurred by a clerical error at her birth in 1883, when a clerk was left to guess that her surname was spelt “Chasnel”. But Chanel also abetted in the creation of her own myth by changing her birth date to 1893.
Although the nuns taught her to sew, it was the stage that originally attracted her. Like Piaf, she picked up a nickname there, from singing Ko Ko Ri Ko. Coco Avant Chanel concentrates on the two affairs that changed her destiny. The first was with Etienne Balsan, a rich aristocrat in whose chateau, explains Fontaine, “she discovers how privileged women of the era dress, and where she invents the very practical clothes that come from riding on horses and running in the fields”. She then fell in love with the young English blade “Boy” Capel, who supported her early in her career but whom she refused to marry until she could pay off her debts to him. As the film hints, her dedication to her career would leave no room for marriage or children.
Capel, who married an English aristocrat and broke her heart, before dying in 1919, also appears at the start of Chanel & Stravinsky, when the heroine attends her first classical concert. It just happens to be the riotous premiere of Le Sacre du Printemps in 1913. The idea that Chanel could claim equal billing with classical music’s first great iconoclastic modernist was first posited by Chris Greenhalgh in his novel Coco and Igor, on which the film is based. Both book and screenplay pinpoint 1920 as the year of Chanel’s efflorescence and attribute it in part to the influence of Stravinsky’s guiding revolutionary spirit. “Designers were second-class citizens for a long time,” Greenhalgh explains. “In the novel and the screenplay, when Stravinsky and Chanel have a fight, she says, ‘I’m just as smart as you. And as much of an artist.’ He says, ‘You’re not an artist, Coco. You’re a shopkeeper.’ It’s perhaps a reflection of the increasing power and significance of women that we’re finally appreciating what she did for them.”
Greenhalgh’s 2002 novel was not the first effort to put the story of Chanel’s liberation of women from the corset at the heart of a fiction. Before her death in 1971, Chanel was able to witness her transmogrification into a musical. Alan Jay Lerner and André Previn collaborated on Coco in 1969. Chanel was delighted to discover she would be played by a Hepburn; less so when she found out she would be embodied not, as she assumed, by the clotheshorse Audrey but by the battle-axe Katharine. The show ran on Broadway for more than 300 performances. If Chanel goes on to prosper in the cinema, don’t back against the musical making a return (like Pam Gems’s Piaf, recently revived).
There was a ring of truth to the casting of the less sylphlike Hepburn. The consensus is that Chanel had the hide of a rhinoceros. “She was tough and quite cold,” says Jan Kounen, the director of Chanel & Stravinsky. “She was a bit of a tyrant,” says Mouglalis. “She built an empire at a time when women were not working at all. She was a fighter all her life. She was angry about centuries of lack of education for girls and wanted to change that. I think she hated women, because she wanted things to change quickly — and women were going for the dresses, not the way of life.”
Rake-thin and with the baritone voice of a seasoned smoker, Mouglalis is ideal casting. They obviously thought so at the Lifetime Network, because she was offered the part of the young Coco for the mini-series before it went to the Slovak actress Barbora Bobulova. For her part, Fontaine was not prepared to proceed with Coco Avant Chanel until she found the right actress. “If I hadn’t had Audrey Tautou, I don’t think I would have developed the project because I needed an ideal interpreter to play Chanel. You can’t imitate her. You have to have the bodily proportions. If she’s too big, it won’t work. If she’s too round, it won’t work, either.”
In the spirit of pre-match sparring, Coco Avant Chanel’s publicity campaign is putting it about that its film is the one officially recognised by the House of Chanel. In reality, Karl Lagerfeld, chief designer of Chanel since 1983, has looked supportively on both productions, supplying access to designs and drawings (though not much exists from 1920). His recent collection opened with a short black-and-white silent film called Paris-Moscou: the house’s connection with Russian culture is clearly not one he repudiates. Just don’t expect him to produce a film entitled Paris-Berlin. However many times they dramatise the life of Coco Chanel, some things remain unsayable.