[Editor's Note: For more reviews of the summer's biggest releases, check out the Daily Loaf Movie Review Index.]
Light on dialogue yet rich in atmosphere, Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky starkly details a brief period of time when the famous clothing designer and brilliant composer entered each other's lives. After the disastrous debut of Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring," Mademoiselle Chanel invites the composer and his tubercular wife and children to stay at her glorious home. Chanel becomes infatuated with him, and he soon reciprocates.
Once the affair between Chanel (Anna Mouglalis) and Stravinsky (Mads Mikkelsen) has commenced, a sexual encounter tells you all you need to know about the relationship: The camera is poised directly above two lovers becoming one, a thick, black band on the bedsheets creating the illusion of symmetry. Once the lust fades, the camera pans down to the foot of the bed, revealing two separate people, a dark line in the sheets now leading to a checkerboard pattern on the wall. For a few brief moments the pair is one, but soon the truth of their deception leads to complications: the people and the lives these two are destroying.
This article appears in Jul 15-21, 2010.