Coco Avant Chanel: Madamoiselle, votre carriage vous attend

I just finished living through Audrey Tatou's beautiful eyes in the film Coco Before Chanel. I saw her transformation through her expressions, which shift as gracefully and imperceptibly throughout the film as a flower opening in still-frame, from pinched and, shall we say, "realist", in the beginning scenes as a destitute saloon singer, to dreamy and yearning as a kept woman with a man she does not love, towards her first encounter with true love, and then her bittersweet, quiet success. Watching her expressions slowly open to radiant joy is like watching a sunrise.
The film keeps alluding to her breakthrough, movable designs. Yet Tatou resists praise. Her character's contrarian approach to fashion and society, her self-imposed vow of solemnity and dry wit, reminded me of so many brooding hipsters I pitied in college. Yet I admire her so much for it. Her Coco chooses to embrace the visual economy of clothing that her initial poverty once forced upon her. Her habit of black is inferred to be a layover from days in a nun-run halfway home. She accepts, to a degree, the too-precious nickname of Coco, which she greets with rolling eyes - it's the name of a pet, not a lady. Watching Tatou watch others, with her know-it-all silence, is the chief joy of the film. I don't know if I love the writing of the film, but by God, I love watching everyone act with their eyes.

Of the real Mlle. Chanel, I know little except this: A famous couturier, Paul Poiret, a far bigger name than Chanel at the time for his costumish outfits, once asked her whose funeral she was attending in her all-black ensemble. She reportedly replied, Why yours, Monsieur. I have always imagined that woman to be the sharp sort. The film confirms this assumption, but softens the edges when Mlle. falls in love. Of course, in love she falls on the worst luck.

I associate things Chanel with the bittersweet. To me, a woman in Chanel might be an iconoclast seeking respectability (so fitting that Lady Gaga wore a Chanel suit to her Barbara Walters interview recently.) When I think of the suits, the bags, the perfumes, I think of the austerity, the compactness, the self-sufficiency that each item exhibits. There is nothing extraneous or wanting. It is not a style that invites another's touch. It is the best camouflage for a pariah who has overcome her sense of shame or inadequacy, because there is nothing inadequate about Chanel. Who mentions now Mlle's lifestyle as a mistress, and the lover of a Nazi officer late in life? No one.

There is a line in the film, Coco Avant Chanel, where her first lover tells her, Good, you're ready for Nietzsche. I like to imagine that Mlle. Chanel did eventually pick up some Nietzsche. In his crazy/genius work, Thus Spake Zarathustra, Nietzsche introduces the ubermensch, or superman. But his message of overcoming shame applies to women as well, and I interpret Nietzche to have some moments where he does not totally disparage women as a whole. Nietzsche says, and I think Mlle. Chanel would agree with him, "Ask the women. The women have always known this: A little more, a little less - So much in life depends on so little." The fine balance of style - that sense of more or less - is what Mlle. Chanel got so right. And that is why I think people want to hear her story. The more bittersweet, the better. I am relieved to know that the world's most perfect designer was, at some level, human.