Steineded How sad is this?

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

Marva It is an exhilarating, distressing, funny and profound film, with one of the more memorable film scores in years,

Haven Kaycee It is encouraging that the film ends so strongly.Otherwise, it wouldn't have been a particularly memorable film

ferdinand1932 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.

Syl The actress who played Coco Chanel in this film is much different than the Coco Chanel film. Of course, all actresses including Anna Mag here offer something to the complex legend and fashion pioneering icon Coco Chanel. By 1913, she's successful and independent. By 1920, she's alone and lonely after the loss of Boyd Capel which I wished that they explained better in the film. He died in a car accident on his way back to her. They had a torrid love affair. Anyway, Coco is enchanted by Igor Stravinsky, a Russian musical genius, who is living in a hotel with his wife and family after the Russian revolution. She sees a kindred spirit in him as an artist herself. Her Coco is lot less affectionate than one might imagine. She's as much a mystery as Igor is to us. Both are artistic geniuses with hers in fashion and his in music. She offers her country home to help Igor and his family back on his feet. At first, she had noble intentions of helping another artist but the two get swept up in the affair. Maybe Igor feels obligated towards Coco. This film may have been more realistic. Igor is played Mik Mikaalsen. Both actor and actress who play the title roles are unfamiliar to me. I enjoyed watching the making of it to understand it. It's a dark film at times maybe too realistic as well.

thisissubtitledmovies excerpt - French director Jan Kounen's Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky explores a period in the lives of the controversial Russian composer and the celebrated French fashion designer, when they briefly lived together in Chanel's country villa, and were rumoured to have had an affair. This was the second film released in 2009 to feature the character of Chanel, alongside Anne Fontaine's Coco Avant Chanel. Kounen's film was released to mixed critical reviews, but was chosen as the closing film of the 2009 Cannes Film Festival.A careful, elegant, and thoroughly grown-up study of two fascinating characters, Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky offers a powerful insight into what made these geniuses tick. Possibly a little slow paced for some, and slightly let down by a clichéd and unconfident ending, but for those with even a passing interest, it's a definite must-see.

pyrocitor To say a film is strikingly subtle may sound somewhat counterintuitive, yet director Jan Kounen's Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky abounds with such precarious artistic contradictions and exploits them with impressive ease. In fact, it seems hardly accidental that Kounen's chosen tone and aesthetic are not far removed from those of Chanel herself: serene, impeccably beautiful, yet with more than a dash of icy aloofness, with a creeping pace and lengthy silent interludes often occupied by nothing more than characters staring with vaguely furrowed brows. Yet in many ways such stillness and silence serve to articulate volumes about the titular characters, the ambiguity of such an approach allowing the viewer to 'fill in the gaps' and piece together the mystery of the characters in the same way they are prompted to envision almost all narrative context. Kounen's film could hardly be less typical as a biopic in the sense that it eschews any exposition whatsoever, forcing the viewer to independently pursue the cause for Stravinsky's banishment from Russia, Gabrielle Chanel's establishment as an independent fashion designer or the significance of almost every other character in the film – a risky touch which ultimately proves beneficial, adding a more interactive element to the narrative and ultimately trimming all extraneous content to instead dwell on the central emotional arc. Apart from an arresting and mesmerizing 15 minute opening performance of Stravinsky's abrasively modern 'Rite of Spring' ballet and the audience's subsequent cataclysmic uproar, Coco & Igor proves aptly titled, its scope boldly remains one of proximity and intimacy throughout. Concentrating on the passionate affair between the two creative icons, their mutual inspiration and the eventual unravelling of both, Kounen leaves exterior concerns such as the mutual cultural significance of both central characters largely left to the audience to supply, apart from precisely placed thematic nuggets (when Chanel, in a dispute with Stravinsky, articulates her having more money and fame than Stravinsky, the composer spits back "You are not an artist Coco – you are 'une vendeuse de tissues'" – a line whose English translation as 'shopkeep' loses an enormous amount of its acidic contempt).That said, for a film that skims to the bare essentials of story, Kounen's editing could hardly demonstrate a more contrary knack for distilling. With cameras consistently gliding slowly across empty halls, up winding stairwells or past brooding characters, the film's hypnotic slowness and cloistered atmosphere is executed with a largely elegant flair, but with a pace so sluggish it threatens to become still photography on numerous occasions, such an approach feels undeniably excessive and unnecessarily restrained (the film's ending scenes, in particular, are agonizingly slow). Although Kounen's brilliant use of the staggeringly beautiful and concussively powerful music by Stravinsky helps inspire the film with passion and the few yet extensive sex scenes do breathe some well needed fire and rawness into the film, there does remain a sense of corseted formality throughout which detracts from the film's engagement factor, capturing the stiffness of a traditional biography in lieu of its inundation of facts. It is a taxing job indeed to retain audience interest through two largely unlikeable, albeit respectable, characters whose emotions are largely glimpsed in traces of the utmost subtlety under grimly stoic exteriors, yet Anna Mougalis and Mads Mikkelsen prove easily up to the task as Chanel and Stravinsky. Both tremendously capable performers manage to convey so much through a frown, a stare, a wintry smile, that even their character development being reduced to vaguely disconnected actions (Stravinsky's starting the day with a grim routine of push-ups and drinking egg yolks, lying in leafy fields or slowing sinking into a bathtub; Chanel's energetically cutting open corsets, imperiously appraising her workers' nails or secretly, contemptuously donating to Stravinky's 'Rite of Spring' "for myself") seems to betray volumes of inner demons. Similarly, Yelena Morozova delivers an equally remarkable performance as Stravinsky's ill, haunted wife Katarina, her silently accusatory presence constantly looming to the forefront and serving as a constant reminder of the off centre moral core of the affair and wounded protagonists. Mesmerizing, daringly sparse and elegant to a tee, Coco & Igor channels the poise and essence of a Chanel concoction at the cost of lacking somewhat of the innovative fury of a Stravinsky effort. While hardly the most informative in regards to the factual history of either character, Kounen's film proves more telling of the pain and passion of either figure than any factual account could be, ultimately proving a serenely audacious and ambiguously compelling success in the vein of either subject.-8/10