Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky

Picking up where Coco avant Chanel left off, focusing on the period when Chanel (here played by Anna Mouglalis) became Stravinsky’s (Mads Mikkelsen) artistic benefactor, this film offers a darker second chapter to the designer’s long biography.

In 1920 she befriended the great revolutionary composer and his family, offering the penniless and homeless musician refuge in her country mansion. There have been rumours that Coco and Igor had an affair at this time.

Director Jan Kounen has worked with writer Chris Greenhalgh to adapt his book Coco and Igor which takes this premise and spins it into an intimate portrait of a fearless modern woman attracted to an equally indomitable man. Shot at many of the original locations and superbly mounted from start to finish, the film opens with a breathtaking recreation of the famous riot provoked at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées by the 1913 premiere of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring. Chanel sits in the audience electrified by her future lover’s assault on bourgeois propriety. (Source: World Cinema Showcase 2010)

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