Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky

“If you are born without wings, don’t do anything to stop them growing” Coco Chanel

‘What is art?’ Jan Kounen asks me, ‘What is not art?’ he continues. The French film director, all glistening eyes and mysterious smile, clearly enjoys rhetoric. I recently had the opportunity to briefly chat with Kounen during his whistle-stop tour of Australia. In his most recent film Coco & Igor, soon to be released in cinemas around the country, Kounen explores the borders of art and commerce and asks the audience to question their own thoughts of the nature of art. Set between 1913 and the early 1920s, the film depicts the alleged love affair between two of the great visionary artists of the 20th century – Igor Stravinsky and Coco Chanel. Both renegades of their time, Chanel and Stravinsky caused disunity among many with their revolutionary ideas about fashion and music. For Kounen, directing the film was the prospect of a journey he couldn’t miss.

In a heady portrayal of intense human connection, the audience is transported from the premiere of the Rite Of Spring in the magnificent Theatre des Champs Elysees in 1913, to the inky rooms of Coco’s country house in 1920. For Kounen, a big attraction to the director’s chair was the opportunity to recreate the tumultuous evening of the Rite of Spring premiere. The harmony of cinema, music, dance and costume created a web of art forms for Kounen to juggle, along with the challenge of re-building a Nijinsky ballet which was never formally recorded. Recreations have relied on testimony and drawings and Kounen’s own reconstruction was “like a whole monument of which you have only paintings, you can only rebuild as you imagine” he explains. The complex, rousing scene is the tour de force of the film, instilling a steady hum of tension that persists with every scene.  “The proposal (for the film) was to have a heavy sky but no storm. It asks the audience for a little effort, but I think it’s interesting to move in another territory. Instead of the volcano exploding, you see the lava bubbling underneath”, says Kounen.Kounen has created a visually sumptuous film, with scenes looking as though they’ve been plucked from a World of Interiors’ magazine photo shoot. Karl Lagerfeld and Maison Chanel collaborated with Kounen to create the elegant dresses for Anna Mouglalis, who plays Coco Chanel. A wisp of a woman, Mouglalis blazes through the screen, cigarette between scarlet lips, in a cloud of impenetrable smoke, displaying Chanel’s fierce independence and penchant for pearls. Stravinsky, played by Mads Mikkelsen, seems equally difficult to decipher, but it is in his music that he finds emotional release. When rehearsals for Rite of Spring began, Stravinsky hired a German pianist to play his score only to fire him in order to play it twice as fast, spinning the dancers to their frenzied limits. So stirring was Stravinsky’s music that Kounen believes the 1913 premiere of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring score was one of the most important evenings in the history of music. “Between Stravinsky and The Sex Pistols there was nothing very important” Kounen quips, explaining that the ardent reaction of the audience at the premiere of Rite Of Spring was much like the riotous response The Sex Pistols generated with their punk-rock act. Rite Of Spring was performed only six times in 1913 at the Theatre des Champs Elysees, but it marked the transition from the traditionalist to the contemporary. To this day, the ballet remains a playground for artistic liberty, with re-workings by Martha Graham, Angelin Preljocaj, Maurice Bejart, Stephen Page and Pina Bausch.

In many ways, the brief and fiery connection between Coco and Igor seemed destined to happen. Elbowing against the constraints of the era, neither could settle with convention in their art. From the film’s first shot of Chanel taking a pair of scissors to her corset, to scenes of Stravinsky penning music that shocked Old World composition into the past, their motivation is as black and white as the keys of a piano or the tone of one of Coco’s famous tweed jackets. Both wanted to challenge the expected in a bid to shift towards modernity. “To move in one direction is to go backwards”, said Stravinsky famously. Kounen believes the same of film – “We have a duty in cinema; to do something different to what was done before but without forgetting what was done before us. For inspiration, we have the duty to welcome it and accept the fact that we are not its master.”

When I ask Kounen why Stravinsky so callously remarks to Chanel that ‘You’re not an artist Coco, you’re a shopkeeper’, he puts it down to a bad case of matrimonial guilt; it’s Stravinsky’s excuse for discontinuing the affair. So was Chanel an artist? “I think she doesn’t care,” Kounen replies “Why react to him? Stravinsky is just using it as an excuse for the relationship. She’s not pissed off because she sees the truth. She is an artist, of course. Art is a social vision she had. The manifestation of that is to do clothes, perfume. She’s even more of an artist, exploring, and discovering possibilities in her own life.”

In the depiction of these two creative giants, it becomes clear that human nature reacts to change in foreseeable ways; we shy away from what we don’t understand or expect. Kounen says of his film, “Maybe what you’re seeing now you say boo to and destroy the career of the people, but in 100 years your children say it’s a masterpiece. Maybe it’s to say look, we don’t know what we see now. The things we love may be forgotten, the things we hate may be famous.” Lucky for Kounen, Coco & Igor won’t be quickly forgotten.

Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky is in cinemas April 15

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