This seems to be a season of Biopic movies of successful women. Audrey Tautou stars as  Gabrielle "Coco" Chanel.  This movie highlights some of  trials and tribulations as a young lady, orphaned or Rather abandoned by her father at the age of twelve in 1895, we quickly move on to her as a young woman working  as a seamstress and part time singer.  What is fateful is the meeting and romance with Étienne Balsan and later the introduction to Arthur Edward 'Boy' Capel whom she had a love affair until his untimely death in 1919. 

What is pertinent to the story is how Coco had an eye for the a simple elegance that was generations before her time.  There is one particular scene at the Ocean.  An odd time in fashion, after Victoria, just before WWI, where the women are wearing corsets, long gowns and mountains of accessories in the heat of summer on the beach, almost caricatures.  Coco on the other had is almost dressed like a tomboy, but comfortable. She is invited to go dancing but needs to have a dress made, and the instructions to the tailor actually doing the sewing and the subsequent scene at the dance are worth the price of the movie.  As the camera moves around to all these beautiful flowing period pastel dresses, like something in a beach scene from Monet, all of a sudden we see Coco in a plain black dress, no corset, no crazy hat, with bare shoulders and just a hint of cleavage dancing with an elegance not understood for another 50 years. There is only a very small mention on the jersey fabric so important to her in the early years, and the story of Chanel # 5 from 1921 is just past the scope of this movie nor germane to it.

Filmed in France as "Coco Avant Chanel" in French with English subtitles and directed by veteran Screen writer and director Anne Fontaine.  The sets are wonderful, the period costumes great.  If anything is a little misleading  I would argue with the relative timelines.   More important to the movie are the relationships to Coco , the people she associated with, and how she developed her eye and talent. 

Finally I have to applaud Audrey Tautou, since her international breakthrough role as Amelie (2001), she has had a career filled with some great diverse roles  like Mathilde in  "A Very Long Engagement (2004), " Sophie Neveu in " The Da Vinci Code" and last years "Priceless" as Irene.   She was a very convincing Coco. 

What I am to take away apart from the story, is the fact that you can be whom ever you want.  In this movie we will see many people of privilege and money leading nihilistic lives of reckless abandonment.  Coco finds the ambition in this environment  to  rise above dependency, to be an independent woman in a paternalistic age.  She smokes in public, wears comfortable clothes, chooses career over marriage, loves whom she chooses. 

Recommended.