'Coco Before Chanel': Audrey Tautou is a perfect fit as the designer

At the end of French filmmaker Anne Fontaine's elegant "Coco Before Chanel," we see a parade of dazzling beauty: a fashion show of Chanel couture, with models parading down the curved staircase in the designer's famous Paris atelier. Gabrielle "Coco" Chanel (Audrey Tautou) watches them sternly; this creator of gowns that float like petals in the wind isn't one to waste a smile. She's at the height of her powers and she knows it; the dresses smile for her.

Except for this late scene, "Coco Before Chanel" shows us little of the glorious Chanel we imagine when her name is mentioned — all perfectly draped little-black-dress or tweed suit, complete with a whiff of cigarette smoke and No. 5 perfume. The Chanel it focuses on is less glamorous but nonetheless made for the movies. The early life of young Gabrielle (nicknamed "Coco" as a child) was tragic and dramatic: a mother who died young, a father who left her at an orphanage in 1894 and never returned for her. For the rest of her life, Chanel would embroider her past as she would a dress, even creating a pair of fictitious aunts who raised her.

Fontaine's film shows us a dark-eyed little girl at a convent orphanage, waiting for a visitor who never came — and observing, at some subconscious level, the elegant simplicity of the school uniforms. Young Coco learned to sew from the nuns, and left the school to work as a seamstress by day and a cabaret entertainer (the movie hints that she wasn't an especially good one) by night. As played by Tautou — without a trace of the delicate whimsy of "Amélie" — she has a firm set to her jaw and a frequently sour expression; this young woman wants something else from life, but isn't yet sure what.

And we watch Coco slowly find it, with a few men turning up as rungs on the ladder: the wealthy Etienne Balsan (Benoît Poelvoorde), who took her as his mistress and didn't seem to mind when she wore his clothes and stitched his shirts into fetchingly tailored dresses; Arthur "Boy" Capel (Alessandro Nivola), who lent her money to open her first millinery studio in Paris, and with whom she had a passionate but doomed love affair.

But Fontaine's emphasis here is on a different passion: the way Tautou strokes a length of beautifully soft fabric before cutting it, as if it's a living thing; the way her very plain black-sequined gown suddenly makes every other lady in the ballroom look overdressed and fussy; the way that, even when she's broke and wearing the same outfit every day, she gives her simple straw hat a tilt that suddenly makes it chic.

The film, understandably, leaves you wanting more about the rest of the designer's life, but "Coco Before Chanel" is wisely focused on those years in which she became herself. Photographed (by Christophe Beaucarne) with the meticulous artistry of a Chanel gown (one particular shot, of Tautou in a nightgown on a gray morning, will take your breath away), it's a joy to watch, and Tautou is crisply mesmerizing as a woman whose life's actions are as decisive as her scissor strokes. Why did you cut your hair, someone asks Chanel, who's suddenly sporting a chic and instantly trademark bob. She replies, "It got in my way."

Moira Macdonald: 206-464-2725 or mmacdonald@seattletimes.com