Read a review of Coco Avant Chanel

I’ve always been utterly disdainful of slapstick, pratfalls and silent movie comedies but, will admit, that the Gallic director/star Jacques Tati (France’s main purveyor of such) had me chuckling like good ‘un with, Mon Oncle (1958). As his alter ego, the well meaning, but enormously accident prone, M. Hulot, Tati visits his relatives the Arpels and their incredibly chic friends. Ensconced in Paris, the rather bourgeois family are everything that Hulot is not. He is a kindly postman who lives in a run down, almost bucolic, part of the city while they live in a fantastically swanky suburban Modernist house (that to this day is one of the finest interiors I have ever seen). Naturally Hulot enters this immaculate world, sticks his spanner in, creates chaos and notices nout .

Of course, the film that put Tati on the map was Les Vacances de M. Hulot, (1953) which shot on location in the small Breton seaside town of Saint-Marc-sur-mer serves almost as much as an intact historical document as it does a comedy. Tati, true to his music hall beginnings as a mime artist, utters just one phrase throughout the whole picture ‘Monsieur Hulot,’ while the scant plot is but a vehicle for a series of softly sardonic studies of human absurdity.

Another DVD release this week looks at another French icon. Coco Avant Chanel reminds me of a guard dog without teeth. The opportunity was there to tell the untold true story of a household name that, riddled with controversy, would have made waves. Instead the film’s director has taken the vacuous Mills and Boon route and told the incredibly boring tale of the designer’s beginnings. “I thought I wanted to make a film that told of how Chanel became Coco Chanel instead of one about what she became,” explained the director Anne Fontaine sitting in Hotel Bacon in Paris. “I thought this was a more interesting story.” How she worked that one out still confuses me. Surely, more beguiling is the story of this woman who, unable to live in anything but unrestrained luxury, throughout WW2 accepted the protection of her lover the German officer and Nazi spy, Hans Gunther von Dincklage, who allowed her to live in the Ritz - a hotel that the Germans were using as their head quarters. Even more intriguing is the fact that after the war it was proven that she did indeed work as a Nazi spy was arrested for war crimes and was acquitted, before trial, via the intervention of the British Royal Family. Indeed, when the Americans liberated Paris, so petrified was Chanel of the fate that met all collaborators that she hid in the Ritz Hotel and subsequently ran off to Switzerland pronto where she stayed in exile until 1953. Chanel’s subsequent renaissance, success and iconic status ensured that all of the above was swept nicely under the carpet but there’s no getting away from it: Coco Chanel was a collaborator who, for an easy life, slept with the Nazi’s.

The Jacques Tati collection featuring: Jour de Fete, Les Vacances de M. Hulot, Mon Oncle, Playtime and Paradise is available now RRP 339.99

Coco Avant Chanel is available to rent or buy