Watch Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky For Free

Wonderful Movie

People are voting emotionally.

The film makes a home in your brain and the only cure is to see it again.

It is a whirlwind of delight --- attractive actors, stunning couture, spectacular sets and outrageous parties. It's a feast for the eyes. But what really makes this dramedy work is the acting.

This movie makes it very hard for itself. It begins with one of the greatest events in western culture in the last two hundred years or so, and after that, well, it's just impossible.There is a long fascination with what famous people said to each other; or how they were in affairs, and the reality is not so very gripping. This story is a putative for a start - well movies always play fast and loose with historical fact.The two subjects are not very engaging, they are rather like wind up toys that move and speak but have nothing inside. It doesn't help that their expressions are permanently fixed and pensive. All the same the production design and photography are very satisfying and with Stravinsky as a soundtrack, it ain't all bad, but it's a bit dour and inevitable.The best part is the opening and the night that The Rite of Spring was premiered. It's almost all accurate and it has the excitement and danger of the theater on that night with music that is still as visceral and intoxicating as ever a century later.

CC&IS starts off well, but soon after the good beginning it becomes apparent that the only reason this was made was to show two people shagging. Some daily soaps and slightly more ambitious porn flicks have just as much depth.To make things worse, it is quite likely that there never was an affair between the two. Coco Chanel was a notorious liar, sort of like a female Baron Munchausen, and a life-long drug-addict. She had fabricated large chunks of her own past in order to hide her humble origins, and was otherwise caught lying on numerous occasions. Hence the claims she listed to her biographer – after decades of being a lying junkie - that she had a bit of the ol' in-out with Igor cannot be taken too seriously. It's not even certain whether she'd dreamed it all up as a result of her morphine/cocaine-induced confusion or whether she made it up just to attract attention to herself; either way, the events in CC&IS have a whiff of bull's dung about them. Stravinsky certainly never confirmed these allegations, and the people around him deny everything (which doesn't serve as concrete proof, naturally, but doesn't exactly help in supporting the existence of a hot Russo-French Winter fling). In short, there is no evidence of this alleged affair at all.Even more false was the portrayal of Stravinsky. He was said to have been a friendly, courteous chap; not at all the gloomy, silent, morose, anti-social, almost-autistic quasi-misfit as Mikkelsen plays him. While it is hinted here and there what a bitch Coco was, CC&IS doesn't even scratch the surface that lies above the unscratched surface of her bitchiness, opportunism, and sheer evil. This was certainly not a woman to be anybody's role-model, not even Sean Penn's. Though perhaps Oprah might have enjoyed her (im)moral compass a tad.Considering how interesting both of their biographies are, I find it stupefying that somebody would develop a script centered around a tiny speck of time (less than a year) in their very long, eventful lives. Stravinsky: married his first cousin, wrote some amazing music, was forced to leave Russia, opposed Lenin's and Stalin's regimes, was a monarchist who hated communism, and even met Mussolini on one occasion declaring himself a Fascist to him. Coco: a lower-class bastard partly brought up in a monastery, an aspiring singer who became a starlet, then a harlot, rose to business glory with the aid of her wealthy male lovers, had been a morphine addict for much of her life, threw cocaine parties, was a spy for the Nazis during the French occupation in the 40s, had a Nazi officer as a lover during that time, financed/aided a former Nuremberg war-crimes SS psycho after he'd been released from jail in 1951, and was strongly anti-Semitic. Furthermore, she helped fund a foreigner-loathing Far Right French publication in the 30s – and then even funded a Far Left publication right after the owner of the Far Right one died. THAT'S how insane, immoral and confused she was. All these things offer much more interest than two actors f**king in a black&white room.But why wonder. The vast majority of movies these days are geared toward women and teens. Who amongst those sheep would want to see a true biography of Stravinsky? We can soon expect an Oscar-winning Jay-Z biopic, but forget Stravinsky.The main casting isn't great. Mouglalis has an uncomfortable, mega-bass deep voice that would shame Saruman or any alpha-male Orc in his service. She has no breasts either, as flat as 15th-century Earth. What she lacks in effeminate tones and chestiness she "makes up for" – unfortunately – in sheer height. She manages to tower over most of the male cast, which makes her look even worse. She must be about a head taller than the real Coconut. Casting square-jawed, tough-looking Mikkelsen to play a skinny, very ugly classical composer isn't exactly the height of realism, but at least female viewers could benefit from it, rather than have to watch a more-or-less attractive woman have sex with a narrow-faced nerd. I could see Mikkelsen as Conan the Barbarian, but as Igor the Stravinsky his credibility is stretched.All in all, you're much better served going to Wikipedia or YouTube. This isn't a biography.

The riot at the premiere of "The Rite of Spring" was much more raucous than this film depicts. The accompanying "Making of" featurette on the DVD shows much more violent action than made it into the final film.All of Stravinsky's music throughout the movie is played slowly and sentimentally, which is not what this composer was all about.We can only conclude that the director is more interested in baroque visuals than telling his story. In fact, it's impossible to believe that a blank stick like Mads Mikkelsen wrote such violent music. The lens is much kinder to Anna Mouglalis, who effortlessly steals all their scenes together, except for the bloodless sex scenes, in which neither are interesting.But I can't believe we'd be talking about either of these personalities today if they'd been as boring and cataleptic in real life as they are in this film. If you want to see character in action, watch Alain Resnais's "Last Year at Marienbad" which compared to this is one long firecracker display.

Anna Mouglalis is very thin, Mads Mikkelsen has wonderful cheekbones and they do not convince me that they are playing Coco Chanel and Igor Stravinsky respectively. The other actors, with the exception of Grigori Manukov as Diaghilev, left no impression on me at all. Surely Chanel had more passion, more anger in her than we see in Mouglalis; surely Stravinsky made more attempts to assert himself with the domineering Chanel than Mikkelsen does here.I was left with a great regret that the great masters of cinema have gone, the directors that were able to fashion material like this into art: Visconti, Losey, Ophuls.