Gallic beauty Audrey Tautou brings a young Gabrielle 'Coco' Chanel to the silver screen in Anne Fontaine's Coco Before Chanel. The latest of a string of Chanel biopics, the film charts the young Chanel's adolescence in a convent orphanage to her rise to the heights of Parisian society and her love affair with Englishman Boy Capel, who funded her first boutique.
Director and co-writer Anne Fontaine and the crew worked closely with the house of Chanel and were allowed to use original pieces for filming: "In the final sequence, all the dresses come from the Conservatory of Chanel," says Fontaine. "Chanel was different. Chanel turned this difference into a fundamental asset, though it must have been a terrible suffering for her. We worked on that transformation with Audrey. At first, she appears as a little peasant girl, unpolished with a beehive hairstyle, then we see how her style clashes with the other women only to become, in the last part of the movie, the incarnation of French chic."
With her short dark hair and elfin looks, Tautou, best known for her roles in The Da Vinci Code and Amélie, was a natural choice to play Chanel; a choice endorsed by the fashion house's creative director Karl Lagerfeld, who describes her as the only "true Chanel."
Coco Before Chanel is released on 31st July.
Sarah Horrocks
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