A Style Of Her Own.(Coco Chanel)

Byline: editor: Valerie Steiker

In Anne Fontaine's Coco Avant Chanel, Audrey Tautou embodies the designer as a feisty young woman. Hamish Bowles goes on set.

Festooned with Majesty palms and Belle Apoque lovelies in rustling pastel confections, the marble-floored entrance hall of the ChAcentsteau de Baronville outside Paris has been transformed into a fashionable Deauville hotel, circa 1909, for the filming of director Anne Fontaine's Coco Avant Chanel. Whirling around the dance floor to the strains of Alexandre Desplat's "Coco Waltz," the elaborately dressed figures seem to ebb like sea foam around a sleek black sea lionAudrey Tautou, uncannily channeling Chanel in a scandalous slip of black satin that evokes the couturier's startling modernity.

"My life didn't please me," Gabrielle "Coco" Chanel declared, "so I created my life." Known for her taut psychological dramas ( Dry Cleaning, Nathalie . . . ), Fontaine says she has been compelled by "the force of Chanel's destiny" since the age of 20, when she first read Paul Morand's L'Allure de Chanel. With Coco Avant Chanel, Fontaine has finally brought her vision to the screen. Unlike a traditional biopic, her screenplay (co-written with Camille Fontaine and Christopher Hampton) focuses on Chanel's early years, before she established her iconic identity as a fashion designer but "when all her future style was born."

The movie begins with Chanel as an abandoned child entrusted to the care of the nuns of the Aubazine convent. Here, her impoverished status was highlighted by her humble little black dressa garment that she would later vengefully reinvent as a fashionable staple for well-heeled women the world over. "The symbols of poverty became the symbols of luxe," says Fontaine.

As a young woman, Chanel yearned to be a singer-dancer but didn't have the talent to survive the unforgiving world of the Toulouse-Lautrecian cafA[c] concert. Instead, the men in her life helped establish her as a milliner, her debut into the world of fashion.

Her first serious protector was the wealthy playboy Etienne Balsan, but Chanel's great love was Balsan's friend Arthur "Boy" Capel, a dashing Englishman whose premature death in a car crash was the great romantic tragedy of her life. Alessandro Nivola handsomely embodies him on-screen. "Prepping for this role has been like a finishing school," says Nivola, laughing. "I've learned to play polo, play Scott Joplin songs on the piano, waltz, and speak perfect French!"