When I reviewed Agora earlier this year, I was justly accused by one reader of rattling on about the history behind the film’s narrative rather than paying sufficient attention to the movie itself.
This kind of thing may be a failing of mine, but I’m afraid that when it comes to another historical (or at least period) movie, Coco and Igor, I will have to indulge myself once more.
You see, the affair between Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel, the pioneering couturière, and Igor Stravinsky, the greatest composer of his generation, has long been a footnote to the history of the arts in the 20th century.
Novelist Chris Greenhalgh had the good idea of fictionalising this brief but presumably intense fling, exploring the gap in the official record.
I haven’t read the novel, so I can’t say what it manages to do or not do, but the movie of Coco and Igor (they are cautiously given their full names in the American release) not only fails to make the most of what historical facts it does include but also excludes some very interesting ones.
Anyway, let me say first (then you can go to the next page if you want to) that the movie is — okay.
In terms of its mise en scène, it does marvels with its period, giving us Chanel’s famous villa on the outskirts of Paris, Bel Respiro, in all its visual glory, plus sundry other nice things to look at.
The score
It’s certainly a triumph for the production designer, the art director and the costumiers. The narrative makes intriguing (though perhaps overplayed) connections between Stravinsky’s and Chanel’s works. It is also rather long — and long-faced. Score as movie: average.
Coco and Igor opens with a wonderfully realised set piece, the premiere of Le Sacre du Printemps — The Rite of Spring — in 1913, which Chanel attended.
She hadn’t met Stravinsky yet, but this rowdy event was a key moment in both the triumph of modernism and in Stravinsky’s career. At the time, though, for all the useful controversy, the Rite was deemed a disaster as a production, and didn’t play for long.
In 1920, World War I and the Russian revolution having intervened, and Stravinsky having spent a penurious period in neutral territory, he finally received an offer to publish the Rite, which would also mean a revival of the ballet and the music in performance.
When this indeed came to pass, in 1921, Stravinsky was now hailed as the foremost composer of the day — so you could say this was a very important event in his life. But the film omits all that. It skips from 1913 to 1920, when Stravinsky was indeed in financial straits and Chanel did indeed offer him and his family (a wife, Katya, who had TB, and four children, plus other relatives and retainers) a temporary home in her villa.
And Stravinsky did indeed, as the movie recounts, promptly embark on a passionate affair with his benefactor. It lasted for the nine or so months the Stravinskys stayed at Bel Respiro, then ended in tears — again, as the film recounts.
Stravinsky was obviously upset (not to mention feeling guilty about his long-suffering wife), but soon after the affair with Chanel ended he met Vera Sudeykina, who really was the love of his life. When Katya finally died, nearly 20 years later, he married Vera, and they remained adoringly conjoined until his death in 1971 (a few days after Chanel herself popped her pumps). By then Vera and Igor had been together for half a century and married for three decades.
Looking miserably into space
The film gives no clue to the real love that would follow Stravinsky and Chanel’s dalliance, preferring to end with intercut close-ups of poor Coco and poor Igor looking miserably into space.
This perhaps rather overemphasises the importance of the liaison; what was probably much more crucial for the composer was the couturière‘s generous bankrolling of the revival of the Rite, even after they parted. (Nor does Coco and Igor mention that Chanel may well have been carrying on a simultaneous affair with an exiled Russian aristocrat – one of Rasputin’s killers, in fact. But perhaps that’s another movie, a Coco après Chanel.)
In the time he spent at Bel Respiro, Stravinsky revised the Rite for publication, though the movie confusingly seems to have him composing it.
He also completed another radical work, Symphonies of Wind Instruments, which has the air of an austere ritual; when first performed it was dedicated to the memory of fellow composer Claude Debussy, who had died in 1918. But it would be possible to see this dirge-like processional, with its severe tonalities and startling disjunctions, as in part a lament for the end of the Chanel liaison.
It certainly could have been used as such in the film, as could Stravinsky’s music for the ballet Pulcinella — the evidence suggests that it was during rehearsals for this more playful, Italianate work that he properly met Chanel. That would have made a good scene, with some colourful dancers and added musical significance.
Instead, the movie gives us the opening bars of the Rite, repeated again and again, as though it were the theme tune of the Coco-Igor romance (whereas it’s the introduction to an ancient, barbaric ceremony).
The pretentious symbolism about sacrifice half-introduced to half-justify its use doesn’t really make sense; neither lover sacrificed much for the other.
More significantly, the film could have drawn on a much richer musical palette than it does, moving from the unsettling Rite and the lighter Pulcinella to the sense of an ending in the Symphonies, but it’s more concerned with the conventionalised portrayal of a doomed love affair and Stravinsky’s two-timing ways.
Ah well. I suppose that, history aside, Coco and Igor is a reasonably watchable two hours, lugubrious though it is. Even so, it has more surface style than emotional depth, and manages to make these remarkable characters seem rather ordinary.
If, in the words of the Cole Porter song, this affair was “too hot not to cool down”, the film makes a decent stab at recreating the heat, yet leaves the audience feeling somewhat cooler than it should.