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Chris Greenhalgh | 326 pages | 22 Jul 2011 | Riverhead Books | 9781594484551 | English | New York, NY, United States Vedi & Igor Stravinsky in Altadefinizione

As IMDb celebrates its 30th birthday, we have six shows to get you ready for those pivotal years of your life Get some streaming picks. Paris Coco Chanel is infatuated with the rich and handsome , but she is also compelled by her work. Igor Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring is about to be performed. The revolutionary dissonances of Igor's work parallel Coco's radical ideas. She wants to democratize women's fashion; he wants to redefine musical taste. Coco attends the scandalous first performance of The Rite in a chic white dress. The music and ballet are criticized as too modern, too foreign. Coco is moved but Igor is inconsolable. ParisCoco is newly wealthy and successful but grief-stricken after Boy's death in a car crash. Igor, following the Russian Revolution is now a penniless refugee living in exile in Paris. Coco is introduced to Igor by Diaghilev, impresario of the Ballets Russes. The attraction between them is instant and electric. Coco invites Igor along with his wife - now sick with Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky - together with his four children and a menagerie of birds to stay at her new villa, Bel Written by . This lugubrious exercise begins with the recreation of a spectacular event in the history of European modernism at which both famous subjects are present. It's a hot night: fans flutter in the audience. Gradually the public breaks out in shouting and argument. The house lights flash on and off. The gendarmes are called in. The evening is a disaster but an unforgettable one. Nijinsky's rhythmic, jerky choreography, performed by dancers in exaggerated makeup and peasant costumes, seen up close here, still seems barbaric and shocking. The music, as much as you can hear of it over the murmurs and shouting, is raucous and gorgeous. Unfortunately nothing else in the film is as exciting as this, or has one hundredth the historical significance. A little affair between two famous people, Igor at loose ends, and Coco still mourning the death of her great love and early sponsor, Arthur "Boy" Capel, this never adds up to much. Coco Chanel views the momentous 'Rite of Spring' performance with the expression the actress is to have throughout the running time: a cool half-smile plays over her lips. She doesn't actually Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky Stravinsky till seven years later, inwhen she invites him to come to live at her country villa-- with his tubercular wife and their bevy of young children who are never individualized. He protests that he is self-supporting, but he's not doing particularly well, he's an exile, and he's living in hotels, so he gives in. Chanel offers him a large room with a piano to work in and comfortable bedrooms for his family. Eventually she also offers him her body. Stravinsky's wife, who is constantly unwell and has no eyebrows and who has to put up with Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky this is going on, is never without a pained expression. Poor Katarina Stravinskaya Elena Morozova! We feel for her, but we don't like her. The Stravinsky's spread around Slavic-looking cloths and even a gilded Russian icon to make their surroundings homier. Everything in Chanel's world is black and white. That should be a warning. As we learn in a dutiful interlude in Grasse, the perfume-making center in the South of France, this was not only the year of the designer's affair with the Russian composer but also the one in which Chanel Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky. Historically, that was an event of more significance. There is too little dialogue in this film. The affair doesn't seem particularly passionate. Why was the Danish actor chosen for this role? Because he has thick lips like the real Stravinsky? Because he can speak Russian and play the piano? Or just because the Dutch-born French director Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky some affinity with him? He never seems to possess the energy of the real Stravinsky, and certainly lacks the wiry physique. He has been wonderful Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky a villain and a spy, but as a Russian musical genius and a lover, he's merely stolid and sad. Or were he and chosen because the film was done in English and French versions, and both could do that? The half-Greek, half- French Anna Mouglalis, with her husky voice, elegant face and long neck, is a high fashion presence. In fact she has been chosen elsewhere by , the present incarnation of the house of Chanel, as the official ambassador of Chanel perfume. She also played, briefly, the Fifties singer Juliette Greco, in the recent biopic about . But Mouglalis has just the Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky expression, the Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky smile. It's hardly surprising that there is no chemistry between the two actors. And with the focus on visuals rather than words, you can only wonder where all this is going, what the point of it is. Partly, it's to show off the spectacular period interiors of Chanel's black and white deco villa, and a succession of striking outfits handsomely modeled by Mouglalis all this doubtless supervised by the indefatigable Lagerfeldprancing around her house, taking them off to have sex with poor old sweaty Igor, delivering imperious commands to underlings at her couture house, being driven around in her Rolls Royce convertible. Day-to-day life at the villa is deadly. Madame Stravinsky admits that her husband's music is going well, but nobody seems to be having much fun. The adulterous couplings are perfunctory. The Stravinsky boys know they're going on. Everyone is polite but miserable. By now we know Chanel will answer with a quick, cool "No. Chanel's handsome gift is Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky to fund the whole season. It allows the "Rite" to be staged again, to great acclaim this time, so that Le Sacre du printemps bookends the film, though we don't see it performed at the end, we only hear Igor drunkenly banging away at it on Chanel's piano, after his wife has gone off with the children. What is he suffering from, exactly? Apparently that cinematic disease, Tortured Artist Syndrome. You will be well-advised to avoid this good- looking but otherwise empty film. Looking Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky some great streaming picks? Check out some of the IMDb editors' favorites movies and shows to round out your Watchlist. Visit our What to Watch page. Sign In. Keep track Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky everything you watch; tell your friends. Full Cast and Crew. Release Dates. Official Sites. Company Credits. Technical Specs. Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky Summary. Plot Keywords. Parents Guide. External Sites. User Reviews. User Ratings. External Reviews. Metacritic Reviews. Photo Gallery. Trailers and Videos. Crazy Credits. Alternate Versions. Rate This. Director: Jan Kounen. Available on Amazon. Added to Watchlist. From metacritic. Jane Austen's Club. Silver screen. Mads Mikkelsen. Use the HTML below. You Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky be a registered user to use the IMDb rating plugin. Edit Cast Cast overview, first billed only: Mads Mikkelsen Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky | Film | The Guardian

It takes place Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky the theatre Des Champs-Elysees and this is where the young couturier then just a newly celebrated designer Chanel who is part of the audience, meets Stravinsky for the first time. Unfortunately for the 20th Century composer, pianist and conductor his modern ballet provoked an outrage and Stravinsky returned to Russia. It was not until seven years later in after the revolution in Russia that brought about such drastic and devastating changes that Stravinsky along with his ill wife and 4 children moved to Paris. Here at her villa in the summer of Chanel and Stravinsky engaged in a love affair. It was the termination of the affair that had a major influence on both the lives of Coco and Stravinsky. What we learn about love, the sharing of love, the giving of love is not where it will lead to, how it will end but rather the things that are evoked from within us as a result of opening Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky and allowing love to enter our lives. It matters not how long you love someone, where the journey is going to take you or not take you, but rather the beauty that comes from expressing love. Stravinsky was so moved that his music changed. Chanel went beyond just designing clothes and so they made their mark in history as a result of that brief moment in time they shared. TAGS: russia. Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky - Wikipedia

They ring the bell at the front garden gate and stand in the shadows, afraid to approach the great man when he appears in the doorway in that famous hook-nosed silhouette. The movie begins with one of the epic moments of cultural modernism, the notorious first night of the Ballet Russe production of Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring on 29 May in Paris. Stravinsky was 31, the son of a well-off, middle-class, Russian family, firmly established as a composer with The Firebird and Petrushka behind him. Coco Chanel, a year his junior, was the product of a provincial French orphanage and had worked as a dressmaker and singer before creating her own innovative fashion house in Paris under the patronage of a rich French playboy and the British industrialist Arthur "Boy" Capel. On this historic night, Coco, played by the regal Chanel model Anna Mouglalis, is in the fashionable haut-bourgeois audience, as is an extremely agitated Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky the formidable Danish actor Mads Mikkelsen. What we witness is a magnificent recreation of the ballet, a pagan rite accompanied by a dissonant modern score, that Diaghilev produced, Nijinsky choreographed, Nicholas Roerich designed and Pierre Monteux conducted. The film brings back vividly the initial response: an audience divided between the affronted and the partisan; Nijinsky shouting instructions to the dancers; Diaghilev switching the house lights on and off supposedly to calm spectators though the effect was to heighten the tension ; Stravinsky denouncing Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky the police called in to restore order. The rest Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky history, or legend. Only a very foolhardy film-maker would contemplate a crescendo after such a spectacular start and Jan Kounen doesn't attempt this. The big night is followed by dramatic, silent newsreel footage of the first world war and the Russian revolution, which brings the story to Paris inat which point the movie becomes an elegant chamber piece. There are no walk-on roles for Cocteau, Picasso et al, no end credits telling us what happened to everyone later. Coco, still grieving for her late lover, "Boy" Capel, and discreetly conducting a bisexual Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky, is coming to dominate the international fashion world, while Stravinsky, now a proud but impoverished exile, Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky living with his Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky wife, Katya Elena Morozova and four children in a Paris attic. Coco meets Stravinsky at a party and, recognising him as a fellow modernist and equally cool egotist, she offers him and his family rooms at Bel Respiro, her palatial country house. Stravinsky accepts as if it were his due as an artist. His wife and children are more enthusiastic and, indeed, the house is truly a work of art, an early art deco masterpiece. Katya has certain reservations. But her initial suspicions of the host are well founded and a passionately carnal affair ensues between Coco Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky Igor. The situation threatens the stability of the Stravinsky marriage and nearly drives him to a breakdown. But it comes to a dramatic end when he brutally tells Coco: "You are not an artist, you are a shopkeeper. Of course he is wrong. She is as much an artist as he is, and equally influential; her claim to being a creator of style rather than a follower of fashion is the same one that could be made for him. As he works on his compositions, Coco devises her first great perfume, which Katya suggests might be called "Coeur de France" or "Folie de Russe". As enchantingly shown in a sequence at a parfumerie in Grasse, Coco gets around to choosing the test phial bearing the number five. This inevitably gets a biopic laugh, though it is infinitely less funny than the scene in the film when the name comes to her while sapphically embracing the rich Parisian Misia Sert, who comments: "Why nart? Eet's always been my fevureet nomber, nomber fife. This is a beautiful, intelligent, shallow film, like a pane of plate glass that at first glance looks like a deep lake. The picture jumps forward from the early 20s to a coda some 50 years later when the elderly Igor and Coco, who died within weeks of each other inare seen contemplating the past on either side of the Atlantic. The Observer Film. This is a polished but unmoving account of the affair between two 20th-century greats. Philip Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky.