Movie Review: Coco & Igor
by KYW's Bill Wine
"You're not an artist," Igor Stravinsky hisses to Coco Chanel during one of their lovers' quarrels, "You're a shopkeeper."
There's not enough perfume in the world to spray on that insult to make it smell nice.
It's said in the romantic drama, Coco & Igor, an account of the rumored romantic relationship between two twentieth-century iconoclasts and icons: French fashion designer Coco Chanel and Russian composer Igor Stravinsky.
Coco & Igor more or less picks up where last year's biographical drama, Coco Before Chanel, starring Audrey Tautou as the title character, leaves off. It's almost a thematic sequel.
She would redefine and democratize women's fashion, he would redefine and shake up musical style. And they would embark on a torrid and tempestuous affair.
When we first see Ms. Chanel, played by French actress Anna Mouglalis, it is 1913 and she is attending the controversially modern and foreign Paris premiere of Stravinsky's avant-garde composition for the ballet, The Rite of Spring.
The worst fears of Mr. Stravinsky, played by Danish actor Mads Mikkelsen, familiar to us as the James Bond villain in Casino Royale, are realized when the outraged and enraged audience turns on his work, choreographed by Nijinsky and performed by the Ballets Russes, and begins hissing and shouting and drowning out the music.
This brouhaha is re-created, staged, and edited in a fascinating, mesmerizing opening sequence that the remainder of the film has a difficult time living up to.
Seven years later, she's the toast of Paris fashion, while he has been displaced by the Russian Revolution and is living in exile and in poverty in Paris with his consumptive wife and four children.
Coco invites Igor and his family to live with her under her roof, at her spacious country estate, where the children can eat and play, Stravinsky can work on his latest opus, his sickly wife can rest, and Chanel can work on developing a fragrance that will come to be referred to as Number 5.
Slowly, tentatively, the title characters become lovers under the eyes of Stravinsky's ailing wife, Katarina, who knows exactly what's going on between her husband and her benefactress, but feels powerless to do anything but wait it out. Katarina is played by Yelena Morozova in the film's best and most telling performance.
Dutch director Jan Kounen, working from Chris Greenhalgh's screenplay based on his own novel, mounts an undeniably handsome production, but a cold and lethargically paced one at that, at least, in contrast to Coco Before Chanel, one which loses its way in the final reel, as if desperate to leave an impression it hasn't hitherto managed.
Mouglalis is convincing as the manipulative and unapologetic Chanel, as is Mikkelsen as the driven if distracted Stravinsky, But neither of the two technically proficient lead performances quite jumps off the page and reels us in.
Still, as a speculative art history lesson at least some of which is true, this stylish if charmless peek through the keyhole has its points of psychological, historical, artistic, and even prurient interest.
So we'll compose 2-1/2 stars out of 4 for the dual portrait of artists in heat, Coco & Igor. Not fun-filled, by any means, but feasible, fashionable, and frosty.
