The Thousands

“Ho hum,” you might be thinking, “Not another Chanel biopic! Coco Avant Chanel was less than a year ago!” This is a fictionalised account of Chanel’s long-rumoured affair with modernist composer Igor Stravinsky, when the penniless Russian émigré and his family stayed at the couturière’s villa outside Paris in 1920. But Coco & Igor goes for style over period stodge.

Director Jan Kounen has taken Stravinsky’s uncompromising Rite Of Spring as the cue for a film that combines stark deco glamour with an emphasis on the animalistic. In its way, it’s as mannered as A Single Man. The famous riot at the 1913 Paris premiere of The Rite Of Spring is shot with an immediacy that’s truly thrilling to watch. Elsewhere, Kounen uses dynamic camera angles and, strikingly, splices in portrait-like tableaux and lyrical moments that do little to advance the plot or explain characters’ motivations.

Neither protagonist is especially likeable; Stravinsky (Mads Mikkelsen) is dazzled by the cold and often ruthless Chanel (Anna Mouglalis). Theirs is no meeting of minds; it’s a meating of flesh. Poor, tubercular Catherine Stravinsky (Yelena Morozova) is the only one to emerge gracefully from this dalliance.