COCO BEFORE CHANEL: out of misery comes magic

COCO BEFORE CHANEL is a beautiful and achingly sad story which reaffirms Audrey Tautou as one of the finest actresses working in cinema today.
She can express greater depths of emotional turmoil with her soulful brown eyes and a slight tilt of the head than many of her contemporaries achieve working every muscle in their body.Her Coco Chanel sheaths her fragility beneath an outer coating of steely determination and stoic acceptance of her lot in life in much the same way as Tautou's most famous creation Amelie Poulain.

As the title suggests, COCO BEFORE CHANEL is the story of how the young Gabrielle Chanel evolved into world famous fashion designer Coco Chanel and I use the word evolved advisedly as her rise was neither meteoric nor pre-ordained. There was no "Eureka!" moment when the young Gabrielle first stood in front of a roll of fabric with a pair of scissors in her hand and morphed into Coco. In screenwriter-director Anne Fontaine's telling of Chanel's story she drifts almost inadvertently into designing clothes and - more surprisingly - might never have become a fashion designer at all had her lovelife not been such a total disaster.
Her early ambitions to become an actress condemned her to a twilight existence in turn of the 20th century French society where wealthy men would accept her as a mistress but never a wife. Initially rigid in her refusal to play along with such hypocrisy she slowly  and reluctantly mellows as she realises the material benefits to be gained and allows herself to fall in love with one particular suitor.
Her story plays out against a series of luxuriously decorated country homes peopled by the idle rich for whom Chanel is never more than a barely tolerated interloper. She's not an easy person to warm to with her face fixed in an expression of contemptuous indifference for much of time,  but it's also impossible not to empathize with her longing for a place to belong and  to be loved for who she is.
Stylistically and thematically CHANEL BEFORE COCO is a cross-Channel cousin of the Merchant Ivory stable of Brit-centric period dramas with the addition of occasionally hard to read subtitles (note to subtitlers - white lettering on a white background just doesn't work). 
Subtitles aside the main gripe is the lack of pace. I don't expect the early life of Coco Chanel to unspool at the same speed as a Jackie Chan comedy but it does drag in places and feels considerably longer than its 1 hour 45 minute running time. 
Absorbing though it is this is not a film to watch late night on a comfy couch.

AMELIE: picture perfect entertainment

It's not too often that I get a warm glow of enjoyment while watching a film these days, but the atmosphere on my couch grew positively tropical as AMELIE played out, and chances are you’ll experience exactly the same sensation.

This French film has restored my faith in cinema to produce films that are heartwarming without being mushily sentimental, funny without resorting to slapstick comedy, and entertaining without the need for car chases, sex scenes, explosions or punch ups.

Over-protected by her cold and distant parents, AMELIE has led a sheltered existence, working as a waitress in a café in the Montmatre district of Paris, and living in her own fantasy world.

Then she finds a 40 year old tin box containing a schoolboy’s long forgotten toys. She tracks down the now middle aged owner, and discovers her true vocation – solving other people’s problems and helping them to find love and happiness.

AMELIE’s world is peopled by ordinary folk with fascinating quirks. They’re all entirely believable, but also funny without realising it.There’s the hypochondriac tobacconist, the intolerant greengrocer, and the solitary young man who collects discarded pictures from passport photo booths, and it’s their lives that give this film so much of its charm.We become AMELIE's co-conspirator as she moves among them, invisibly sorting out their problems and punishing their transgressions.

Audrey Tautou is just fantastic in the title role, conveying a beguiling mix of innocence, craftiness, and steely determination to do the right thing, until it comes to her own love life.

Flora Guiet, who plays the 8 year old Amelie, is also superb, acting her white ankle socks off while making it look like the most natural thing in the world.

The other star of this film is Paris. Set mostly in 1997, but drenched in 50s style Technicolor, the city looks so picture-book beautiful, it’ll have you firing up your laptop as the final credits roll to book a long weekend there.

Words like charming, delightful, and life-affirming are so rarely used to describe films these days that they seem rather old fashioned, but they describe AMELIE perfectly.

If you’re looking for an extremely good time and a warm glow of deep satisfaction, spend a couple of hours in the company of this young lady. I guarantee you won’t regret it.