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WHO'S AFRAID OF COCO CHANEL?

The real question of "Coco Before Chanel" is not how the woman of its title became herself, but whether the actress Audrey Tautou can plausibly portray a character who isn't Amélie. Tautou is both blessed and cursed by her physiology: bright-eyed and kittenish, she's the epitome of a certain French type: the approachably exquisite woman you hope to one day meet. "Coco Before Chanel", meanwhile, demands that she transform herself into someone more forbidding. And she succeeds.

The film begins with a young Gabrielle Chanel and her sister being deposited at an orphanage run by nuns. Little good comes of this upbringing except, perhaps, Gabrielle appreciation of crisp black-and-white uniforms. The girls are soon seen as young women performing silly songs at a saloon for tips (one number concerns a dog named Coco). Upon meeting a wealthy gadabout named Étienne Balsan, Chanel swiftly installs herself at his country manor, learning to ride horses and play polo. She snip Balsan's ties into truncated bows for herself.

From the start, Chanel is a woman to admire rather than like, and neither Tautou nor Anne Fontaine, the movie's co-writer and director, confuse the two. Tautou is good at tightening her face into something more than cute; she turns her ink-dark eyes and hair into features that intimidate rather than endear. Blunt and aphoristic even in her twenties, Chanel is determined never to marry. When her sister observes she has no heart, she doesn't argue. "A woman in love is helpless," she says. "Like a dog begging."

The film is wise to take its measure of Chanel as a person, not as a designer. This lets Fontaine avoid the clunky mechanics of a bad biopic--the better to coax the audience into considering both the woman and the world through her eyes (and given how obtuse and unlikable Chanel could be, this is no easy feat).

But while "Coco Before Chanel" avoids awkward prefiguring of sartorial genius, it happily includes that most satisfying of film tropes: the creation montage. To see Tautou as Chanel patterning and sewing a slim suit in mere seconds is a breathtaking experience, both for cinema and fashion.

"Coco Before Chanel" is playing at select cinemas

~ MOLLY YOUNG