"COCO CHANEL"
DVD Review
by Kevin Carr
| MOVIE: ** (out of 5 stars)
DVD EXPERIENCE: *1/2 (out of 5 stars) STARRING Barbora Bobulova as YOUNG COCO CHANEL Olivier Sitruk as BOY CAPEL Valentina Lodovini as ADRIENNE Sagamore Stevenin as ETIENNE BALSAN Malcolm McDowell as MARC BOUCHIER Shirley MacLaine as OLD COCO CHANEL Rated PG Studio: Screen Media Films Directed by: Christian Duguay Back to DVD Review Home |  |
WHAT IT’S ABOUT
Fashion legend Coco Chanel did not always live in the upper crust of society. She struggled through her early years. The Lifetime biopic “Coco Chanel” tells the story of the designer in flashback form after her attempt to redefine herself in the middle of the century. The story fills in her early life as an abandoned orphan who later built her own business on the streets of France. Dealing with challenges in love, business and family, Coco Chanel proved to be a fighter that made her famous.
WHAT I LIKED
While I have a particularly good eye for women’s fashion (a little known fact about myself), I really don’t care about the fashion world. In fact, I am so disinterested in the world of fashion that I really didn’t know anything about Coco Chanel aside from her famous brand-name perfume (which I cannot identify by scent, by the way) and her company logo that works as a status symbol.
Because I knew pretty much nothing about the woman that was Coco Chanel, this film played to a blank slate. I didn’t see anything repetitious to the facts of her life simply because I was ignorant of her entire existence.
The acting is pretty decent in this TV movie, although the biggest props go to the older cast, including Shirley MacLaine as the old Coco and Malcolm McDowell as her business associate. The younger cast is decent enough, and Barbora Bobulova as the young Coco is quite fetching. However, they do fit into the made-for-TV mode, not allowing them to give a solid enough performance to break out of the small screen.
Still, MacLaine is deserving of her Golden Globe and Emmy nominations, and this movie is worth sitting through if you’re a fan of hers.
WHAT I DIDN’T LIKE
Although biopics are extremely popular among viewers of both television and film, they tend to follow a very predictable formula. This is even more apparent when it’s the biopic of someone famous in a flashback. We, of course, know that Coco Chanel makes it big. We know that she does, in fact, have a successful business. So all the struggles we see are softened by the fact that we see her as a rich, famous and notable woman throughout the film.
Also, as with most biopics, the movie does turn into a bit of a puff piece about the subject. In this film, Coco Chanel is always the victim, never the aggressor. If she has any faults, it’s because she challenges the archaic and sexist principles of the day. Yet, as an older woman, you can tell that she has some lingering issues.
It’s not a terribly balanced or objective view of Coco Chanel, but then again, I don’t suppose they planned it to be.
DVD FEATURES
There’s a single behind-the-scenes featurette to this DVD, although it’s partly in the French language, which makes for some annoying subtitle reading if you’re a lazy bastard like myself.
WHO’S GOING TO LIKE THIS MOVIE
Fans of Shirley MacLaine and Coco Chanel.
