Stometer Save your money for something good and enjoyable

Flyerplesys Perfectly adorable

ScoobyMint Disappointment for a huge fan!

Bob This is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a very long time. You have to go and see this on the big screen.

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.

MartinHafer Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky'I feel as if I hardly know you'--quote from Mrs. Stravinsky, and an apt description of how the viewer will probably feel about Mr. Stravinsky in this film.Coco Chanel never married but had a long string of affairs. Later in life she talked about them and claimed to have been the mistress of quite a few men--one of which was Igor Stravinsky. According to Stravinsky's second wife, this affair never occurred. However, wife #2 was definitely his mistress for many years before his first wife died and this mistress became wife #2. So, while we don't know for sure that Chanel was telling the truth, Stravinsky was not a faithful husband. So, the historical accuracy of this film is unknown--though the events surrounding this did occur. It is true that Chanel invited the Stravinsky family to live with her and she was his patron during a rough patch in Stravinsky's career.So does all this make a compelling picture? Well, if your only goal in a film is to see Mads Mikkelsen (Stravinsky) naked, then this film is for you. However, I found the film to be completely devoid in energy and emotion. As for the steamy sex, believe it or not, it was quite boring. As for me, I have no idea why this film was made. It is too unappealing and slow to interest most folks and although the acting was nice (particularly Mikkelsen as he did a good job at the piano and spoke several different languages in the movie), I just cannot recommend the film. A clear miss.

fedor8 CC&IS starts off well, but soon after the good beginning it becomes apparent that the only reason this was made was to show two people shagging. Some daily soaps and slightly more ambitious porn flicks have just as much depth.To make things worse, it is quite likely that there never was an affair between the two. Coco Chanel was a notorious liar, sort of like a female Baron Munchausen, and a life-long drug-addict. She had fabricated large chunks of her own past in order to hide her humble origins, and was otherwise caught lying on numerous occasions. Hence the claims she listed to her biographer – after decades of being a lying junkie - that she had a bit of the ol' in-out with Igor cannot be taken too seriously. It's not even certain whether she'd dreamed it all up as a result of her morphine/cocaine-induced confusion or whether she made it up just to attract attention to herself; either way, the events in CC&IS have a whiff of bull's dung about them. Stravinsky certainly never confirmed these allegations, and the people around him deny everything (which doesn't serve as concrete proof, naturally, but doesn't exactly help in supporting the existence of a hot Russo-French Winter fling). In short, there is no evidence of this alleged affair at all.Even more false was the portrayal of Stravinsky. He was said to have been a friendly, courteous chap; not at all the gloomy, silent, morose, anti-social, almost-autistic quasi-misfit as Mikkelsen plays him. While it is hinted here and there what a bitch Coco was, CC&IS doesn't even scratch the surface that lies above the unscratched surface of her bitchiness, opportunism, and sheer evil. This was certainly not a woman to be anybody's role-model, not even Sean Penn's. Though perhaps Oprah might have enjoyed her (im)moral compass a tad.Considering how interesting both of their biographies are, I find it stupefying that somebody would develop a script centered around a tiny speck of time (less than a year) in their very long, eventful lives. Stravinsky: married his first cousin, wrote some amazing music, was forced to leave Russia, opposed Lenin's and Stalin's regimes, was a monarchist who hated communism, and even met Mussolini on one occasion declaring himself a Fascist to him. Coco: a lower-class bastard partly brought up in a monastery, an aspiring singer who became a starlet, then a harlot, rose to business glory with the aid of her wealthy male lovers, had been a morphine addict for much of her life, threw cocaine parties, was a spy for the Nazis during the French occupation in the 40s, had a Nazi officer as a lover during that time, financed/aided a former Nuremberg war-crimes SS psycho after he'd been released from jail in 1951, and was strongly anti-Semitic. Furthermore, she helped fund a foreigner-loathing Far Right French publication in the 30s – and then even funded a Far Left publication right after the owner of the Far Right one died. THAT'S how insane, immoral and confused she was. All these things offer much more interest than two actors f**king in a black&white room.But why wonder. The vast majority of movies these days are geared toward women and teens. Who amongst those sheep would want to see a true biography of Stravinsky? We can soon expect an Oscar-winning Jay-Z biopic, but forget Stravinsky.The main casting isn't great. Mouglalis has an uncomfortable, mega-bass deep voice that would shame Saruman or any alpha-male Orc in his service. She has no breasts either, as flat as 15th-century Earth. What she lacks in effeminate tones and chestiness she "makes up for" – unfortunately – in sheer height. She manages to tower over most of the male cast, which makes her look even worse. She must be about a head taller than the real Coconut. Casting square-jawed, tough-looking Mikkelsen to play a skinny, very ugly classical composer isn't exactly the height of realism, but at least female viewers could benefit from it, rather than have to watch a more-or-less attractive woman have sex with a narrow-faced nerd. I could see Mikkelsen as Conan the Barbarian, but as Igor the Stravinsky his credibility is stretched.All in all, you're much better served going to Wikipedia or YouTube. This isn't a biography.

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