27
COCO CHANEL & IGOR STRAVINSKY
Love, beautifully composed
by Dan Kois When the two modernist titans of “Coco
Chanel & Igor Stravinsky” finally, you know, get down to business, they disrobe in very different ways. Chanel’s unwrap- ping is elegant and simple: a single button freed, and her gorgeous white dress falls like the ceremonial unveiling of a statue. In the face of this self-assurance, poor Stra- vinsky fumbles with his trousers, his shirt and tie, his wire-rimmed glasses. Igor may be the most important composer of the 20th century, but he is a mere human. Co- co, in this beautiful but indulgent French film, is a work of art. It would be difficult for director Jan
Kounen to make this movie look bad, filled as it is with beautiful things: to start with, leads Anna Mouglalis and Mads Mik- kelsen, shot by ace cinematographer David Ungaro. But even more striking is the villa outside Paris where the film is set, sur- rounded by lush forest and perfectly deco- rated in Chanel’s signature black and white.
And boy, is it indulgent. Two leisurely hours it runs, and — aside from a dynamic opening sequence — Kounen is more inter- ested in artful tableaux than in drama. So this is a movie for aficionados only: lovers of 1920s design, fans of Stravinsky and devotees of Coco Chanel for whom last year’s “Coco Before Chanel,” starring Au- drey Tautou, just wasn’t enough. The movie begins with the 1913 Paris premiere of Stravinsky’s revolutionary bal- let “The Rite of Spring.” Kounen’s roaming camera brings to life both Vaslav Nijinsky’s daring choreography and the audience’s wild responses: “Go back to Russia!” one wag shouts, while others get in fistfights at the Theatre des Champs-Elysees. Back- stage, Ballets Russes founder Serge Diaghi- lev flips the house lights on and off in an at- tempt to calm the crowd, and soon the po- lice have stormed in. But then the film skips forward to 1920 and slows way down. Chanel invites the
inception from 25
rather than steal an idea, a client named Saito (Ken Watanabe) hires Cobb and Arthur to plant one in the mind of Rob- ert Fischer (Cillian Murphy), in a proc- ess called “inception.” It’s a tough job, and Cobb proceeds to assemble a crack team of dream-weav- ers to help him pull it off, including a wily forger named Eames (Tom Hardy), a chemist named Yusuf (Dileep Rao) and a young architect named Ariadne (Ellen Page). Nolan has always been prone to mak- ing hermetic, self-serious movies, from his 2000 breakthrough film “Memento” to “Batman Begins” and “The Dark Knight.” But he lets a little more air into “Inception,” in the form of an occasional joke and an essentially popcorn-movie premise.
REGINE ABADIA/SONY PICTURES CLASSICS
Mads Mikkelsen and Anna Mouglalis are visually striking as composer Igor Stravinsky and fashion icon Coco Chanel, even if the characters’ romance isn’t very compelling.
struggling composer and his family to leave the Paris hotel into which they’ve been crammed. And so Igor, his consump- tive wife, Katia (the otherworldly Elena Morozova), and their adorable borscht- eating moppets make their way into the countryside and are soon ensconced in the immaculate rooms of Coco’s monochrome villa. “You don’t like color?” Katia asks. “As long as it’s black,” Coco replies. While lonely Katia pines upstairs, Igor gives Coco piano lessons, and the two pro- vocateurs flirt to the strains of Gabriel Yared’s Stravinsky-ish score. (The fact that it sounds like every other movie score is a reminder of how commonplace the avant- garde dissonance of “The Rite of Spring” has become.)
Once the couple’s affair begins, though, the imbalance in the relationship becomes clear. Coco is debonair and arch; the long, lean Mouglalis plays her as a Chanel who buys into her own legend. Inscrutable Cha- nel turns Mikkelsen’s serene Stravinsky uncertain and defensive, his only refuge his belief that he’s an artist while she’s a mere shopkeeper. She isn’t a mere anything, of course.
She’s as revolutionary in her time as he was just seven years before. So dedicated is Co- co to the pursuit of her aesthetic that she inspects the salesgirls in her Paris bou- tique, making sure they look and smell ideal. A long (and questionably relevant) stretch of the movie follows her to the par- fumier who develops her signature fra- grance, Chanel No. 5; even surrounded by vats of rose petals, there’s nothing soft about her. Coco Chanel, in short, is substantially more interesting than Igor Stravinsky. While “Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky” never overcomes that disparity to portray a compelling romance, it does offer a few moments as inspired as that famous open- ing bassoon in “The Rite of Spring,” or as singular as a Chanel frock.
weekend@washpost.com
Kois is a freelance reviewer.
R. At area theaters. Contains nudity and sex. In French and Russian with English subtitles. 118 minutes.
BB
DiCaprio and Page bring quiet focus to roles that would have been scuttled by showboating. Hardy, who delivered an astonishing turn in last year’s “Bron- son,” provides most of the film’s wel- come comic relief, needling Gordon- Levitt with deadpan economy as the scheme just gets weirder. In “Inception,” Nolan manages to cre-
ate a world all his own. And that’s a world that, while clearly a product of an auteur’s idiosyncratic impulses, meets viewers at precisely that liminal state between dream and reality where mov- ies work best. Nolan exemplifies the best kind of
filmmaking, unchained from the laws of time, space and even gravity but nev- er from the most basic rules of narra- tive. Even at its most tangled and para- doxical, “Inception” keeps circling back to the motivation that has driven films from “The Wizard of Oz” to “E.T.”: Cobb, finally, just wants to go home. That aim, in its simplicity, manages to
make comprehensible even the most preposterous layers-upon-layers of “In- ception” and gives what could easily have been a chilly, impenetrable exer- cise a surprisingly strong emotional core. At its most audacious and en- terprising, “Inception” provides just the kind of fully imagined escapism that ad- venturous filmgoers wish movies as- pired to more often. But it’s the story’s most recognizable human struggles — to let go, forgive and move on — that make “Inception” worth puzzling over, long after its most transporting sensa- tions have washed away.
hornadaya@washpost.com kids from 25
lies its sometimes forced setups. It’s a mov- ie of brief, almost furtive pleasures meant to be comprehended at dog-whistle fre- quencies, like Jules’s Elvis Costello and An- tone’s T-shirts, or the expression on Nic’s face when she says the name of a friend of Laser’s the moms disapprove of. Cholodenko skillfully mines the compli-
cations of the story not for gags or punch lines, but for moments of wry, observation- al humor (there’s a hilarious sequence in which Jules expounds on lesbian porn be- ing “inauthentic”). The performances are
consistently terrific, although between “The Women,” the recent “Mother and Child” and now this, Bening is in danger of being eternally typecast as the uptight, brittle control freak. Within an ensemble of consummate pros, Wasikowska shines as a young woman grappling with the push-and-pull of a lovingly enmeshed fam- ily and forging her own fragile identity. As Nic and Jules weather the tiny earth-
quakes of two teenagers growing up (with one Peter Pan along for the ride), “The Kids Are All Right” becomes an amusing, occa- sionally piercing, but ultimately forgiving portrait that should strike a warm, familiar
chord with everyone who has left home or is facing a rapidly emptying nest. Yes, this ruefully funny movie is about a gay family, but mostly families, as laboratories of that elusive formula known as Loving While Letting Go. As Tolstoy said, the happy ones are all alike, and as “The Kids Are All Right” shows, even the happiest ones take work.
hornadaya@washpost.com
R. At Landmark’s Bethesda Row and Landmark’s E Street Cinema. Contains strong sexual content, nudity, profanity and teen drug and alcohol use. 106 minutes.
BBB
PG-13. At area theaters. Contains sequences of violence and action. 148 minutes.
BBB½
ALSO OPENING
A group of friends competes in a national tween music video contest in Standing Ovation. This movie did not screen for re- view. PG. At area theaters. Contains some rude behavior. 108 minutes.
THE WASHINGTON POST • FRIDAY, JULY 16, 2010
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72 |
Page 73 |
Page 74 |
Page 75 |
Page 76 |
Page 77 |
Page 78 |
Page 79 |
Page 80 |
Page 81 |
Page 82 |
Page 83 |
Page 84 |
Page 85 |
Page 86 |
Page 87 |
Page 88 |
Page 89 |
Page 90 |
Page 91 |
Page 92 |
Page 93 |
Page 94 |
Page 95 |
Page 96 |
Page 97 |
Page 98 |
Page 99 |
Page 100 |
Page 101 |
Page 102 |
Page 103 |
Page 104 |
Page 105 |
Page 106 |
Page 107 |
Page 108 |
Page 109 |
Page 110 |
Page 111 |
Page 112 |
Page 113 |
Page 114 |
Page 115 |
Page 116