Coco Channel and Igor Stravinksy – Review

This independent film about designer/perfumist Coco Chanel and musician Igor Stravinsky might have attracted more attention, especially among the Killer Film crowd, had the producers employed the alternate title Predator vs. Alien. As the monster Chanel, the lithe Anna Mouglalis exhales cigarette smoke from her nose like an annoyed dragon. She also uses scissors more adroitly than Grace Kelly in Dial M for Murder and single-mindedly pursues a “perfume as complex as a person.” Voilà, Chanel No. 5. An exile from Russia with his wife and four kids in tow, Stravinsky (Mads Mikkelsen, resembling an aging Freddy Mercury from the rock band Queen) plays the alien, furiously composing heavily-notated modern music when not throwing temper tantrums and overturning his bureau. Isolated from his wife, children and lover, music consumes him. Even the ornate Victorian art deco setting of longette spectacles, ostrich feathered hats, velvet drapes, Tiffany lamps and stringed corsets fails to distract the artist.

Director Jan Kounen deserves kudos for fashioning a variety of shifting, somber moods, including a thoughtful internal monologue with a most unusual change of perspective. While the film explores transcendence (Stavinsky composes scores for ballets and Chanel gives shape to both gowns and scents), one memorable scene has Coco sliding past against a series a of mirrors in the film equivalent to Marcel DuChamp’s “Nude Descending a Staircase, #2.” Stravinky’s “Rite of Spring,” Wikipedia tells me “transformed the way subsequent composers thought about rhythmic structures,” pulsates throughout the film and crescendos in a truth-telling way like a Greek chorus. Only loves scenes are surprisingly detached, like cats playing. Unlike I Am Love, neither independent character here can yield to the other. The result: a draw. This Clash of two Twentieth Century Titans ends more with a whimper than a bang in Coco Channel and Igor Stravinksy.

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