Coco & Igor

*Spoiler alert*

Two girlfriends and I dressed in our classic, black and white best for the TIFF gala showing of Coco Chanel and Igor Stravinsky last night at Roy Thompson Hall. Anticipation hung in the air as we sat in our finest horizontal stripes, pearls and vintage black purses, listening to director, Jan Kounen speak lovingly of his film.

But it wasn’t long after the opening credits (which seemed to go on forever), that Kounen had lost us, and most of the audience, I’m afraid.

In an unrelenting opening scene, Stravinsky’s latest ballet is being debuted to an unappreciative, disdainful audience. The snobby French patrons have no time for the revolutionary The Rite of Spring and the evening is essentially a disaster. By the end of the scene, I couldn’t quite blame that French audience. Kounen succeeded in convincing us that the ballet was an assault on the senses. My stomach dropped; there was a sense of foreshadowing I couldn’t ignore. Coco Chanel and Igor Stravinsky would be far too avant-garde even for me (a lover of often-slow-moving, eccentric, art-house films).

The story tells the tale of Coco Chanel and Igor Stravinsky at a time when he is struggling to revolutionize music, and she is democratizing fashion. Coco is a fan of Igor’s work and invites him, his wife and his gaggle of adorable children to stay with her in her country home so that he can write. So begins their depressing love affair — all of which is carried out within 50 feet of Igor’s loving, supportive, ill and frail wife, Katia.

There were good elements to the film. 1. Coco’s wardrobe was stunning, and Anna Mouglalis, who played her, looked stunning in it. 2. The art direction was lovely and Coco’s manse was really the third leading character of the film. 3. Danish actor Mads Mikkelson is a sexy beast in person or whether he’s playing a bad guy in Casino Royale or Igor Stravinsky (as he does here). 4. There is an incredible, untold story of two lovers that not many people know about. Unfortunately, there are simply too many foibles in its telling.

In one scene, somebody comments that Igor’s music lacks subtlety. Someone should have given the same advice to the film’s editors. The film was a two-hour, intensive strangle hold that never let up. The drama was so unrelentingly intense that at some points I had to look away from the screen — and let’s be clear, this was no Tarantino film. The scenes (particularly in the last 45 minutes) were so long and drawn out — and let me add, so rarely peppered with dialogue — that we couldn’t leave our seats fast enough when the closing credits (finally!) appeared.

Same went for the score. Yes Stravinsky was a revolutionary and often dark composer… but didn’t he have a light sonatina or two that could have been thrown in? How can we appreciate his revolutionary dissonance if we have nothing to compare it to?

The icing on the cake for me was delivered through a line that Igor gives Coco when she compares their similar artistic ambitions. “You’re not an artist, you’re a shopkeeper,” he says, with all the dramatic delivery of a soap opera.

While I liked both choices for the leading actors, Mouglalis and Mikkelson, I’m afraid they had no opportunity to showcase their skills. Never have two characters been written so one dimensionally: heartless, callous, cold.

After months of watching her husband fall in love with another woman — and don’t forget, the other woman is the gorgeous, elegant creature Coco, constantly bedecked in her French finest — Katia gathers up the remainder of her dignity, her belongings and those aforementioned adorable children and leaves him. As she enters the car, she looks into the eyes of her childhood sweetheart and says, “I love you.” He slams the door in her face and re-enters his love shack with Coco.

Similarly, in one scene, Coco is confronted by Katia, who asks her “Don’t you ever feel guilty?” Coco’s answer: “No.”

That’s it?

And there’s never any indication that she does feel guilty for sleeping with a married man three doors down from his wife and children. Are we really going to vilify the single, independent woman because she manipulated this poor, married man? The filmmakers give us nothing likeable about Coco, so we don’t like her. Are we to believe that Coco Chanel was just a bad person? Even she can’t be so black or white. — Julia LeConte