COCO CHANEL & IGOR STRAVINSKI - REVIEW


Another year, another extended Chanel advert. Unfortunately, unlike Coco Before Chanel, this doesn't have much to work with. What we get is not so much a Chanel biopic as a vague Stravinski biopic awkwardly stuck inside a sexy Chanel bubble.

The main problem is that, really, the film has nothing interesting to say: Chanel and Stravinski had an affair...they had sex...buy our perfume! This is literally it. Having said that, Jan Kounen does a remarkable job making such an empty narrative interesting. The cinematography is stylish and well crafted and the score is beautiful. A terrific scene involving a Stravinski concert going awry is definitely a highlight.

There's good performances here. Anna Mouglalis' over-cool but genuinely manipulative and really pretty dislikable Chanel is a lot of fun and Mads Mikkelsen conveys a lot with the shameful 5 lines he was given to work with (!). His performance, although practically silent, is nevertheless the most compelling in the entire film and without him there would have been nothing to hang on to dramatically.

Overall, it all feels like the novel probably had much more to say than the film which is really slight on pretty much every level. The many gratuitous sex scenes between the two leads don't really bring anything to the table either, except perhaps very talented bodily fluids...? They had an affair, affair = sex, we get it. Not to mention the whole Chanel N5 subplot which I'm still perplexed about to this day. Did it have any bearing on the main story? No. Apart from being a blatant, in your face ad for the fashion brand and an exercise in sucking up to Coco...I don't see the significance.

Coco Chanel and Igor Stravinski is a film which looks good, sounds good but which sadly feels emptier than a mannequin's head. Quel dommage...

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

STAR TREK: FIRST CONTACT - REVIEW

Image
Finally free from the clutches of the iconic Original Series , Picard and co. finally got their own movie to play with and delivered this much better, much darker, much less gimmicky outing. This time, we're introduced to the Borgs, a race of soulless, zombie-like drones capable of assimilating people completely. A popular race of bad guys in the series, their Hellraiser -style S&M look certainly begged for a movie! First Contact opens with Picard having a nightmare about the time he almost became a Borg forever and little by little, as the current Borg threat increases, he starts to crack up, feeling a responsibility to sort that problem out himself as he still has a slight connection to them but also wanting a kind of revenge, closure if you will, for what they did to him the first time around. The plot sees the crew of the Enterprise witness the Earth get completely assimilated by the Borgs so they go back in time before Earth made its "first contact" with al
Read more

24: SEASON 1 - REVIEW

Image
I know, I'm like 100 years late. But I'm The "Retro" Critic! :P I remember catching a glimpse of this iconic show back in the day and actually finding it pretty entertaining. Sadly, I hadn't followed the thread from the very beginning so it felt like catching the season about halfway through would be a bit of a waste. I decided to wait until I could check it out on DVD. 10 years later... Well I finally made it, that's the main thing, right? So was it worth the wait? What do I make of this very first season? It's good. I thought it would be quite good and it was. Basically I'm rarely taken by a cop-themed series unless you've got a mad scientist in there ( Fringe ), evil twins ( Alias ) or... Columbo ( Columbo ). But 24 did a hell of a good job keeping me entertained throughout and making me care about MOST of what was going on. Kiefer Sutherland's Jack Bauer is a hard one to dislike and is pretty much the glue holding the whole sho
Read more

THE ADDAMS FAMILY MUSICAL - REVIEW

Image
 Looks like every Broadway comedy musical these days is trying to be The Producers ... Mel Brooks' hugely successful show now being the basic template for shows based on movies (with the exception of the admittedly *ahem* unique Spiderman musical), after Dirty Rotten Scoundrels we're treated to Broadway's The Addams Family. An odd release but probably an inevitable one. Not based on any of the movies, the story actually follows up from past adaptations and sees a now grown-up Wednesday falling in love with a "normal" dude and having to face her unconventional family. It's essentially Addams Family Values with Wednesday taking on the Fester role. A good idea which should please both fans of the films and those looking to see something new. But what works for The Producers just doesn't work for everything. Nathan Lane as Gomez Addams? So much for the tall, suave, maniacal Gomez we all know and love! Don't get me wrong, I love Nathan Lane but list
Read more