'Coco Chanel'
TELEVISION REVIEW
Shirley MacLaine stars in the Lifetime biopic of the late fashion designer, which leaves out too many threads of her life.
There may come a time when “Lifetime movie” as a shorthand for sentimental, feisty-gal-sobfest is stricken from the lexicon. But that day is not today.
Instead, today we consider “Coco Chanel,” an original movie event premiering tonight that has such high production value and so little artistic value that a viewer may find herself at times whimpering in disbelief.
Three seemingly endless hours long, "Coco Chanel" still manages to omit the most celebrated decades (and a scandalous affair with a German officer during World War II) because it is much more interested in a tedious account of Chanel's early love life. A little whitewashing is forgivable in a biopic, but to make a movie about the most influential figure in fashion history in which she spends more time moping around about her boyfriends than she does designing clothes is infuriating. The contestants on "Project Runway" are taken more seriously as artists than Chanel is here.
Mercifully, it is a gorgeously shot film, with hats to die for, period opulence and poverty well-depicted and, eventually, all those fabulous Chanel suits. For those who found the Oscar-winning film "La Vie en Rose" far too depressing (not to mention French), there may be enjoyment in this Americanized tale of similar pathos. Like singer Edith Piaf, Chanel suffered the early death of her mother, an impoverished childhood, father-abandonment, hardscrabble young adulthood and a few unwise romantic choices, but with a happier outcome. Unlike Piaf, an alcoholic and drug addict who died at 48, Chanel lived to the ripe old age of 87. She never stopped working and experienced a postwar renaissance when she was 69.
This is where "Coco Chanel" opens. Played by the venerable Shirley MacLaine, the elderly designer is staging a comeback show. (Her comeback actually followed an exile in Switzerland; Paris never forgave her for having an affair with an occupying officer. This is never mentioned.) As her glad-handing business partner, Marc Bouchier (a surprisingly insufferable Malcolm McDowell), watches in horror, it bombs.
Coco is unfazed; she is, she says through a plume of cigarette smoke, used to rejection. (Cue flashback to tubercular mother, deadbeat father, etc.) To MacLaines' everlasting credit, she does not attempt an accent, assuming, accurately, that at this stage in her career she is naturally imperious enough to seem French without sounding like it.
