He was busy with The Rite of Spring and she was busy concocting her most famous perfume, but somewhere in there Igor Stravinsky and Coco Chanel found the time to have a passionate affair. Sadly, you may not care.
Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky is a film account of that relationship, a story based on the book about the designer and the composer by Chris Greenhalgh. As Stravinsky, Mads Mikkelsen is suitably moody and misunderstood, but Anna Mouglalis never quite makes Chanel flesh and blood here. The movie goes out of its way to get all the Chanel trappings and artifacts correct, but that attention to detail ends up being a distraction, not an enhancement. You're watching a love affair between a man and an icon.
That's just not sexy.
The movie starts out with a tremendous rush: a recreation of the chaotic 1913 performance in Paris of Stravinsky's Rite of Spring, an event that had concert-goers and gendarmes duking it out over the then-controversial music and ballet. It's the future! Chanel is there, and she's impressed.
The story fast-forwards several years. Chanel is now famous and Stravinsky has changed his address thanks to the Russian revolution. He is living in France with his sick wife and four children. When he and Chanel meet, sparks fly, and before too long she has invited him and his family to stay at her villa outside Paris. He'll be able to work, his wife will be able to recover her health, their children will frolic in the countryside, etc. That's the thinking that puts the composer and the designer under the same roof.
They begin an affair. "Your work has more passion," says Stravinsky's long-suffering wife. Pointedly.
Stravinsky's wife (Yelena Morozova) is presented here as the person who keeps his life and work together. She is an understated but crucial presence, and Morozova's wonderful performance makes her seem a more complex and interesting person than Chanel was. Is that what the filmmakers intended?
As Chanel, Mouglalis is chilly, demanding and successful; this may well capture the designer's general aura, but it would have been nice to have seen what it was about Coco Chanel that Stravinsky found so irresistible.
Here, she's just a study in perfect black and white and long pearls. (Sadly, during the love-making scenes, looking at the duplicates of Chanel's actual bedding and furniture is rather more interesting than watching the fake sex. Not a good sign.)
Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky is attractive as a bit of history and it's generally pretty to look at, but it's never engaging in a way that lets you forget you're watching a movie. She's imperious. He's tortured. The lovers are often silent in each other's presence and there's a lot of off-hand yearning going on; still, it doesn't seem to be going anywhere.
The story eventually flashes forward in time to show Chanel and Stravinsky in old age, each but a footnote in the other's life. Was theirs a love story? A romantic folly? Just star nookie on both sides? What it all means remains a mystery.
(This film is rated 18A)
liz.braun@sunmedia.ca
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