A couple of movies about starting small, and making your way in the world, despite everything.

1.
Coco Before Chanel (Coco avant Chanel)
2009, Anne Fontaine

This is the story of the early life of Gabrielle (Coco) Chanel (Audrey Tautou). As I know very little about fashion, I was completely unfamiliar with her biography. But with a life stretching over almost nine decades (1883-1971), it turns out she's a very fascinating character.

According to Anthony Lane, once Chanel had become a public figure, she "grew so richly inventive about her past, powdering over any discrepancies and shames, that all the film can do is pick and choose, and hope that some of its testimony escapes the fog of myth".

But what's fairly clear is that her mother dies, and her father leaves her in the care of an orphanage. She later moves to a convent, where she learns the skills of a seamstress.

A few years further on, we find her singing at a provincial tavern (it's one of her songs -- Coco at the Trocadero -- that inspires her new name). And then she goes to live with Etienne Balsan (Benoit Poelvoorde). Lane continues: "He is the best thing in the film, and an accurate, oddly touching demonstration of a type: the pleasure-hunting wastrel, who surprises us, and himself, with the emergence of unfashionable feelings. Coco, having met him in the tavern, rolls up to his country estate, where he breeds thoroughbreds and misspends the family wealth... Late in the day, she wins his philistine heart. More important, she borrows his tweed waistcoat, and crops his black ties to make herself a bow. Until this film, I hadn’t realized how much Chanel stole from men’s clothes..."

The Chanel who's portrayed here, though, is never one to idle away her time in comfort. She learns new skills, and hoovers up information and support from Balsan's guests and friends. Eventually she strikes up another relationship -- based on both business and romance -- with Englishman Arthur "Boy" Capel (Alessandro Nivola), only to be confronted with his tragic death in a car accident in 1919.


The photos in this post were taken in Brittany in 1992. Inspired by her own Breton experience, Chanel is reputed to have turned the striped Breton sailor shirt into a fashion item. Or not...



Apart from a coda where we see some of the fruits of her success -- "the understated Chanel style twice transformed the world of fashion, once in the 1920s and then again in the 1950s" -- this is where the film ends. Which is neat, because the rest of her life involves a large degree of "biographical untidiness" (there's some majorly dodgy business, for example, relating to the anti-Semitic laws of the Vichy government, and she became the mistress of a Nazi officer, and reportedly, a spy for the Germans).

Here's Le Figaro, enthusiastic about the time delineation: "The film has its flaws, of course. But the gamble taken by director Anne Fontaine was huge. How do you bring Coco Chanel back to life? How do you take the complexity of one of the legends of French fashion, whose name is now known around the world, and make it tangible? Anne Fontaine resolved this question by choosing to focus only on the formative years of the future Mademoiselle Chanel. This period of budding and sprouting, these moments of fragility during which the Chanel style is gradually born: that's the answer. And the gamble paid off."

This decision was also what attracted Audrey Tautou. As she read biographies and watched videos of Chanel, she started to form the impression of "strong, tough, authoritarian character". She continues: "My approach was to tell myself that Coco was an angry character. She's not necessarily angry with people, but she is in the grip of an inner chaos that is difficult to live with. She wants to exist without knowing quite how. That weight was heavy, and I carried it every day during filming." (And on seeing Tautou's performance, Edmonde Charles-Roux, on whose book the movie is largely based, remarked that "it's Chanel exactly as she was".)



By Fontaine's account, Chanel is tenacious, haughty, indomitable -- and obviously immensely talented. She's willing to be innovative and unconventional, and has absolute faith in her sense of style. An inveterate liar, and a consummate exploiter of opportunities, she really epitomizes what it is to be a self-made woman.

I can see why it didn't get mega reviews (64% on Rotten Tomatoes), although I get the impression (not scientifically evaluated) that the French liked it more (for Le Monde, for example, it's a "beautiful sentimental thriller"). I found it a little too relaxed in pace. And we don't see quite enough of how her skills as a couturier evolved.

But I certainly found it interesting to learn about Chanel's "contribution to female emancipation". For Fontaine, "She wasn’t an ideologue, but she was a kind of precursor to feminism. We don’t realize it today, but to live in a corset was a kind of prison. It was extraordinarily inventive to liberate the woman’s body and to invent those supple lines."

And anyone who hates Christian Dior's New Look can't be all bad: "She accused him of restoring the 19th-century ideal of women as pretty objects for the comfort of men. A woman sitting down in a Dior dress, she said, looked like 'an old armchair'."

So I'm curious to find out more, an outcome I'm sure Fontaine would be very happy with.



2.
Three Summers (Tres Veroes)
2019, Sandra Kogut

The background to this movie is Brazil's Operation Car Wash, a years-long police investigation, beginning in 2014, "into a money laundering scheme in which black market money dealers used small businesses to launder dirty money".

Rafaela Gomes offers a good contextualization: "Every day it is there, emblazoned before our eyes. Between the covers of newspapers and weekly magazines, and in the inexhaustible and endless cable TV news, corruption is the theme that -- unfortunately -- remains a sine qua non in Brazil. And, naturally, the subject has been made into books, analyses, articles, and artistic productions, all aiming to explore the core of this longstanding Brazilian practice. But what happens in the post-war scenario -- when the arrests and plea bargains are over? What happens to the spoils, and to all those who orbit around the crimes, always oblivious to what has happened?" These are the questions Kogut sets out to answer.

The story starts a little confusingly, as we're not given much help in establishing the characters and their relationships. But once I'd settled in, I ended up really rating it. It's understated, and carefully observed -- one of those movies that manages to be both funny and tragic.

The location is Angra dos Reis, a seaside locality to the west of Rio de Janeiro. The key character is Mada (Regina Case), housekeeper at the summer residence of a rich Brazilian family. Mada is warm and engaging, with a highly mobile face, and she both carries and holds the movie together over the course of the titular three summers (2015-2017).



At first, the class division is enormous. The height of Mada's ambition is to have a small kiosk that sells pork and bananas (when the movie opens, she's negotiating to buy the land for this); to supplement her income, she uses the family kitchen to make food for outside customers, and sells online any hand-me-downs that come her way. The family, on the other hand, is clearly loaded (at one point Mada is warned that some ornament is worth more than a lifetime of her salary...) When we first meet them, they are throwing a big party for the 20th wedding anniversary of the owners (Edgar and Marta). It is obvious that no expense has been spared.

But by the following summer, the gap has started to close. Edgar (Otavio Muller), the businessman behind all these riches, has obviously been involved in some dodgy dealing, and is taken into custody awaiting trial. So it's down to Mada to come up with ways to pay the staff. Her solutions make up a lot of the comedy, but you wince as you laugh. She organizes a yard sale of the fancy stuff in the house; arranges boat tours of the adjacent coast, dotted with other smart houses now boarded up or confiscated (the only ones not in jail are either foreigners or footballers, we're told); promotes the property as a film set; and lets it out as a "Harry BnB". In the midst of all this, you learn Mada's tragic story -- she lost her whole family in a landslide -- which makes her resilience and entrepreneurial spirit seem doubly admirable.



One person who certainly feels that way is Edgar's father (Rogerio Froes). Having recently lost his wife, he initially appears somewhat sidelined in the busy, noisy family. But as the glittery ones disappear into incarceration or exile, he starts to shine more brightly. He feels terribly guilty about his son's corruption, supports Mada's schemes, and eventually bequeaths to her his Cococabana flat. That's the final scene: Mada and the staff, by the sea, going off to see the fireworks.

A lot of English-language reviewers seem underwhelmed by this movie (and how annoying that so many feel it necessary to advise their readers that Christmas is in the SUMMER because it's BRAZIL...).

Lusophone critics are much more viscerally tuned in. For Luan Ribeiro, for example, it is a "unique, sensitive, and very special film about how the Brazilian people have the power to transform their obstacles into opportunities"; for Sihan Felix, "an intimate treatise on class differences"; for Alan Fernandes, "a bittersweet portrait of the current political and economic scenario in Brazil". Notwithstanding its fluctuating pace, Fernandes continues, Three Summers "tackles, masterfully and lightly, thorny issues such as the contrast between social classes, and the structural corruption that kills the people, and corrodes both the gears of the public machine and the average dream of improving yourself. Above all, it deals with the real essence of being Brazilian: resisting the countless adversities that life offers without losing the smile on your face."

Three Summers is compared with Bong Joon-ho's Parasite in this piece by Michel Gutwilen. Which is an interesting idea... There's none of the overt horror and violence of the South Korean movie, but there are shared themes: "Both films ... explore the rise of the working class in a microcosm -- the house in Angra dos Reis and the Park mansion -- in which physical space, formerly belonging to the wealthier class, is now reappropriated." In the final scene of Three Summers, we're again in a kitchen -- the space where we've most often seen Mada operating -- but this time it's the kitchen of her new apartment. She and her erstwhile fellow-staff members are gathered again. But this time they're no longer employees, but "free" people: "In a film of spaces, occupations and resignifications, the kitchen now represents the realization of the dream of owning a home."

Go Mada...