One month and counting with Sugar Entertainment, I’m the new Production Coordinator at PopSugar TV Network. PopSugar TV Network currently produces four channels of original video content after the PopSugar brands: PopSugar TV, Bella TV, Fab TV, and Yum TV, and each channel hosts a myriad of shows airing twice to five days a week. Check out some recent episodes here… and tune into www.popsugar.tv for more!
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Happy Holidays!!!
This may have been my best con ever. Waldo and I took the Promenade on 3rd Street! But some damn photographer kept catching up with me, hot on my tail! No sooner had I looted an unsuspecting shop or vendor, when I’d see, out the corner of my eye, a pointed finger and a flashing bulb.
But there’s no catching Carmen Sandiego. I would have made off with considerable more loot had it not been for Waldo. He didn’t turn out to be such a hot escort…. He kept disappearing! Wandering off, like the spacey tourist he is. I’d make a run for it, and when I was in the clear…I’d see him looking every which way, clearly lost and utterly clueless. Well, what can you do.
We did escape the clutches of our pursuers sure enough, but it was a close call! But wouldn’t you know, in lieu of catching the culprit, the stinkin’ paparazzi are trying to make a profit off their pirated photos! So, I guess the upside is: you can follow the mad chase yourself if you like….just check it out at Blurb.com.
Well, Happy Halloween.
–C
Click on the Pic to visit the Official Movie Website!
With a talent like Audrey Tautou, we could only expect Coco Before Chanel to be delicious. The portrayal was like chocolate: perfection. Not only does Tautou truly look the part, but she also embodies the intensity, instinct, and humor of the legend as well. In an inspired coupling with Benoît Poelvoorde (as Étienne Balsan), Tautou realized the delicate balance between a woman in social and emotional captivity and a woman constantly out of bounds.
But like every sumptuous morsel, a performance like this demands an encore, and if this film has a fault, that fault is its brevity. Never again will an actress so fit the role of Chanel, and yet here was Tautou, tailor-made for the part, in a film that just glanced upon the events that made Coco Chanel.
As the title suggests, the film explores Chanel’s beginnings, but just barely. She is shown orphaned as a child, then working as a seamstress, a singer in a bar, and finally as a courtesan. Each of these moments deserves their mention in the film. But when she falls in love—a near impossible feat considering her past—Tautou does not have the opportunity to live out Coco’s resultant determination. Anne Fontaine’s story speeds past the juicy bits of Coco’s battle to climb the social and professional ranks despite all odds, and instead ends the film with sparse clips of Coco as the Final Product—the legend that the film promises plainly in the title NOT to address.
The events that best reveal her character are those involved in her struggle and determination to become a self-made woman in an era when women were not supposed to make anything: not hats, not dresses, and least of all, something of themselves. Before Coco became a designer label, she struggled to open a shop, and later, to keep her shops afloat. Coco respected industry above all else, which is why she falls for Boy Capel. He is a “self-made” man in a world of “old money.”
Coco worked through the Second World War in a Nazi-occupied France. When neither her own profits nor her lovers’ contributions could produce the funds to keep her business alive, such was her determination that she found a new lover and accepted his aid. His name: Hans Gunther von Dincklage. His title: officer of the Third Reich. Plenty of drama and controversy flooded the life and work of Coco, and all before she earned recognition as Chanel. Why then would Anne Fontaine choose to leave so many details untouched? This was a woman of metal, not just silks and wools. Hers was not a story, in any phase of life, that began and ended with men and love affairs. The heart of Chanel was in her perseverance through the fluff, her independence from frills and feathers.
This is not to say that Coco Before Chanel didn’t have its strengths. If anything, it is one of the most honest films on the subject of modern feminism I’ve seen. And the portrayal of the time and Coco’s surroundings was extraordinary. As Anne Fontaine’s first period piece, this was without doubt a success. Once Coco moved in with her first lover, Étienne Balsan, her story truly came alive. With Tautou behind the wheel, Coco weaved in and out of utter vulnerability and unmatched confidence.
But though it is true: Coco’s life within the walls of Balsan’s castle is a novel unto itself, and a film worth making; the key to Coco lies in the fact that she left. And that departure is the film I want to see. She had the courage to shed the security she’d come to know and make a castle—an empire of her own.
If you’re like me and love to investigate different versions of the same story, check out the Lifetime network film, Coco Chanel with Shirley MacLaine, that aired in the fall of 2008. It was definitely worth seeing.
Click on the Pic to visit the official movie website!
When Audrey walked in with that jaunty little step, she wore slender black pants and a gold blouse to drape her tiny frame. Her hair was black and stormy like her eyes, the eyes that so fit the role of Coco Chanel. She greeted everyone with a smile, and asked if it would be acceptable if she spoke to us through a translator. “I did like 23 interviews,” she explained, “and my answers were so stupid I was like—ah!” She rolled her eyes and shook her head of wild hair.
In the film, that hair was of the period, drawn back into a modest heap typical of a working seamstress, or free falling over her pajamas in long, waving strands. In the film, she looked extraordinarily like Chanel. But Tautou not only had to look the part, she had to play the legend. Or as her director (Anne Fontaine) stressed, she had to actually be Chanel. In fact, that was one of Fontaine’s two conditions under which she would agree to write and direct the story: she had to have the perfect actress. On being approached with the project, Fontaine told the producers, “If I had not [Tautou], if she doesn’t exist, I don’t want to write it.”
But of course, no matter how perfect Tautou was to fill the role, even she had to do her research, and her primary resource was the biography written by Edmonde Charles-Roux. When asked about the difficulty of playing a real person in time, of taking on the responsibility of portraying the truth about someone’s life, Tautou had an interesting response. Of course there’s always pressure playing a celebrity whom the public already believes they know. But, she said, “There’s actually some comfort in playing somebody who has existed and has a psychology that’s already there. But where I worked was on the border—the frontier between interpreting and finding, exploring this part of her life [the beginning] that not a lot of people knew about…” Because so much of Chanel’s youth, that history, was obscured by the lies she told. Chanel created fictions around her past, because, as Tautou explained, she did not like what she remembered. The actress read dozens of accounts on Coco’s life, and she admitted, “I could tell from the different books, who believed in the lies that Coco spread about herself and who didn’t. And in the case of Edmonde…he dispelled many of the lies that Coco was trying to set up.” So in a way, Tautou’s responsibility to historical truth was not so great that she could not afford some freedom in her interpretation of Coco. Chanel herself was changing the past. Tautou’s most serious responsibility, rather, was to the persona—perfecting the panache. And so she did.
Click on the Pic to visit the official movie website!
That mysterious past was the other condition under which Fontaine agreed to take on the project of writing and directing a movie about Chanel. She wanted to choose a small part of her life. “It’s not possible,” said Fontaine, “to do a biography, about all 87 years of her, without…illustrating in a very superficial way.” And it could not be a small part of her life as the label or anyone else but the Young Coco, the pre-Chanel. Fontaine found that chapter of her life to be the most moving, “because she’s more insecure.” She went on to say, “When you are famous, for me, it [intrigues] me more to know who the person was at the beginning than at the end. For one reason: because at the end, everybody here knows something about her, and you want only to see that the actress looks like the pictures you have in mind. But when you are younger, you are more free to invent and to exist.”
Click on the Pic to visit the official movie website!
Tautou agreed whole-heartedly, and that was why she fell in love with the project and signed on with Fontaine. But if she could have explored another part of Chanel’s life, Tautou said, “I was very moved by that very final chapter of Coco Chanel, when she was at the end of her life. For so many decades she was ahead of the times, but there’s a part towards the end where society not only caught up with her, it then surpassed her. And she changed.”
After seeing the film, I was aching for more of Coco. Wouldn’t that be an interesting story to tell… Ladies and Gentlemen, a sequel? Encore?
Click on the pic to visit the official movie website!
