Review: Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky

The second French film in two years about Coco Chanel has no connection with its predecessor, although Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky begins almost exactly where Coco before Chanel left off, with the couturier about to lose her lover Arthur “Boy” Capel in a car accident. Presumably someone in Paris is already at work on Coco, the Nazi Collaborator.

Coco & Igor is not a patch on the first movie as entertainment, although it is definitely sexier, boasts even more elegant Chanel outfits and has the benefit of Stravinsky’s music, including large chunks of the ballet, The Rite of Spring. The latter makes a terrific, doomy soundtrack but it is not enough to breathe life into the longueurs that become more and more frequent in the second half of the film. A shame, because Coco & Igor begins with an impressive sequence depicting one of the most famous evenings in 20th-century music, the premiere of The Rite of Spring, performed by Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes in May 1913.

Chanel was in the crowd that night and the film has her, played by the stunning Anna Mouglalis, witnessing the spectacle with a cool, enigmatic half-smile. She is later introduced to Stravinsky and there is an instant mutual fascination. Almost nothing is said by the two modernist icons, though Stravinsky accepts an offer to move with his family into her villa outside Paris. The house turns out to be gorgeous, a perfect stage for Mouglalis’s Chanel to parade around in slinky evening wear that emphasises her sharp, naked shoulder blades.

Stravinsky is played by the Danish actor Mads Mikkelsen, an ex-Bond villain with a striking resemblance to the composer as a young man. He says little, brooding impassively while Magoulis’s Chanel smokes and stares insolently. For what feels like hours.