Coco Conquered with Style

Chanel’s straight to DVD bio flick doesn’t do her any justice.

By Kirsten Kilponen
Published: July 9th, 2009 | 5:05pm

Sometimes you can just tell a movie was made by Lifetime. Constantly whispering actors and the occasional forced feminist discourse against the backdrop of some love story are red flags of a made-for-TV movie that shortly after went to DVD. The recently released Coco Chanel, directed by Christian Duguay, is such a film. Despite Coco Chanel’s stirring life full of lovers, pitfalls, perfumes, and infamous pantsuits, what should be a fashion feast for your eyes falls short due to shoddy cinematography and bad dialogue. The extraordinary costumes and the comical old lady Chanel redeem the film from being a 139-minute disappointment, and the crappy nature of the film itself fortunately makes it an instant guilty pleasure.

Coco Chanel follows the life of the designer from her days as a penniless orphan to her rise as fashion’s favorite icon. The charming, chain-smoking, elderly Chanel is fittingly played by the unstoppable Shirley MacLaine, whose award-winning performances include Terms of Endearment and Hollywood classic, The Apartment. The narrative switches back and forth between a mature Chanel and her younger self, played by Barbora Bobulova, as she battles everything from deceitful lovers, failed business ventures, and even Nazis.

How well this is all executed, however, is debatable. The film often lacks cohesion, and not in a non-linear, avant garde kind of way, but in a poorly edited, confusing kind of way. Also, the large focus on her relationships with creepy men almost seem to overshadow Chanel’s fashions, and the immeasurable amount of obvious foreshadowing and extreme close-ups are painful to watch. Furthermore, the unnecessary use of dialogue is so strong that the director must have forgotten that films allows you to tell stories visually, and the dialogue itself is a bit too contrived with lines like, “You can turn a straw hat into a verse of poetry,” and “This hat has the answer before the question is even asked.”

Beneath the poor production lays historical gold — the little black dress, the Chanel suit, Chanel Number 5 — it’s all there. The costumes alone (despite the occasional historically inaccurate number and a couple of busted weaves) are a visual pleasure-fest for the eyes. Moreover, if you can get past the positivist catch phrases, like “Freedom is never out of style,” you’ll appreciate Chanel’s contribution to liberating women via fashion. At a time when women were wearing corsets and 3-foot-wide hats, Chanel was wearing pants, designing short skirts, and encouraging women to wear comfortable jersey fabrics long before American Apparel could ever say “Deep V.”