Coco avant Chanel is an utterly leaden, dead weight of a movie. Coming out of the cinema, all I could think was, "If Coco Chanel's early life was really that boring, why bother making a movie about it?" The plot is extremely thin- she and her sister are abandoned in an orphanage by their father, they become cafe singers, her sister becomes a mistress to a count and Coco gets involved in a sort of menage a trois with two rich men (one of whom is supposedly the love of her life- he's English and called Boy. How could he be anything other than a cad?). There's lots of tedious too-ing and fro-ing that seems to go on forever, she trims a few hats and commissions a little black dress and then suddenly has her own fashion house. It's so utterly unconvincing. The normally cute as a button Audrey Tatou bears a remarkable resemblance to the real Chanel, but even she's unable to breathe any life into this anemic film.
I happen to have quite a lot of respect for courtesans (Madame Armfeldt in Sondheim's A Little Night Music being a favourite character of mine). Many were shrewd businesswomen who knew exactly what they were doing, but this film tries to portray Chanel as an emancipated woman who succeeded independently against a male dominated society when that wasn't really the case. She may have never married (as the postscript informs us as if that's the most important detail about her life), but she was completely dependent on her lovers' money to get started. While I don't blame her for that, she was far from being sexually or financially liberated. Everybody seems to love a rags to riches story, regardless of the implications...
Coco during Chanel would have been more interesting. Quite possibly the most pointless film I've ever seen (thank goodness it was free with a Sunday Times preview!).
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