- Also Known As:
- Year:
- 2009
- Countries:
- Predominant Genre:
- Romance
- Director:
- Best Performances:
- None
- Premiss:
- The story of Coco Chanel’s rise from obscure beginnings to the heights of the fashion world.
- Themes:
- Original Sin | Personal change |
Self-expression | Compassion | Totalitarianism | Political Correctness | White supremacy | Ethical Politics - Similar (in Plot, Theme or Style) to:
- Unknown
- Review Format:
- DVD
Enjoyable melodrama about a fascinating figure who either made feminism possible by dispensing with the common use of the corset in haute couture or was simply following the inevitable trend away from restrictive clothing for women.
Given the lowering of the infant mortality rate - from advances in medical science - women could work and have careers in addition to being wives and mothers.
This film wants to have it both ways by suggesting that the tail wags the dog in politics in that necessity is not the mother of invention. And yet, if Gabrielle Chanel had been born a hundred years earlier, her designs would never have been accepted. Not because they violated tradition but because women had to produce babies to compensate for the high infant death rates.
The problem with so much feminism is its inability to relate the social position of women with the wider culture in which women live such that feminists are propagandized as women ahead of their time when they are merely ahead of the game. The latter recognize that they can change things because science and technology - not women’s yearning to be free from nappies and cooking - have made it possible.
Moreover, science and technology largely devised by men. This explains why low-technology cultures have so little change in their social arrangements because without science there can be no reason for such change.
Having said all that, the other issue that this film does deal with well is whether clothes wear you or you them. Fashion victims are always mutton-dressed-as-lamb because they have no idea of their own style and simply copy what is modish.
Here we have a designer who knows what works and that most women do not in fact, at any given time, fit the stereotype that fashionable living demands. In this, Chanel’s character and her work become one as she refuses to relinquish her principles for the sake of being a flash-in-the-cultural-pan.
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