REVIEW Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky

For at least a half hour, Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky is a brilliant and exciting film and seems almost sure to be one of the best of 2010. Then it becomes simply good. Then it becomes merely interesting. And then, about 15 minutes before the finish, it becomes dull and interminable.

Now if this had happened in reverse - if it went from dull to amazing - we’d probably call this film a great success. But movies, like criminals and traitors, tend to be judgedfor how they end up, not for the good they do before they lose their way. Yet this needn’t be an ironclad rule, especially with a film like this, whose first scenes are not just good or promising but dazzling. In them, director Jan Kounen meticulously reconstructs one of the most important artistic events of the 20th century, the debut of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring.

The place: Paris. The date: May 29, 1913. Coco Chanel gets up from thebed of her lover, Boy Capel, to go to the ballet. For those who saw Coco Before Chanel, this is not the grumpy but cuddly Coco of Audrey Tautou. This is the sleek, inscrutable Coco of Anna Mouglalis, and Mouglalis is simply more believable in the role: Angular, shrewd and unsentimental, Mouglalis can wear anything and look like an aristocrat. She also seems smarter than everybody and slightly terrifying, which is right for the role.

On this night, Coco has an opening-night ticket to see the new Stravinsky work, as choreographed by Nijinsky and performed by the Ballets Russes. Lucky her, lucky us: Because she has a ticket, we have one, too, and if you’ve ever wished you could go back and see that seminal, world-shaking night,this movie is as close to a time machine as you could ever hope for.

Sometimes knowing what’s going to happen makes things more dramatic, not less (as anyone who has ever watched the Zapruder film can tell you). By the end of the show, the staid, upper-class audience will have erupted. People will be hissing and shouting at the stage. Audience members will be fighting in the aisles. The din will be so loud that the dancers won’t be able to hear the music. But Coco, sitting in the audience, will understand exactly what she’s seeing and welcome it.

The sequence is more than just dramatic - it’s moving. You are witnessing an audience’s reaction to the coming of the 20th century. You are seeing an angry and hysterical denial of truth. And could you blame them? From 1815 to 1913, Europehad lived in relative peace and stability. But The Rite of Spring foretold chaos, violence, a mechanistic nightmare, just as Nijinsky’s strange, propulsive choreography turned bodies into jerking machines. This was the future, and only an alert, prescient and uncompromising sensibility could see it - and recognize any beauty in that truth.

The rest of Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky deals with the love affair, of sorts, between these two inventors of the modern. The affair comes about slowly and is complicated by the fact that Stravinsky has a perfectly nice and rather essential wife (Elena Morozova), who understands his work inside out and seems to know every move he makes before he makes it.

The essential problem with the latter part of the film is that, as presented here, Coco and Igor are just too cool to say anything. Minutes at a time go by without any dialogue, and the film begins to feel like an attempt at a silent movie - that is, music and pictures, without dialogue - that fails.

Coco Chanel

& Igor Stravinsky85Cast: Anna Mouglalis, Mads Mikkelsen andElena Morozova Director: Jan Kounen Rating: R, for sex and nudity Running time: 120 minutes In French and Russian with English subtitles.