Coco Before Chanel **1/2

Director: Anne Fontaine
Cast: Audrey Tautou, Benoît Poelvoorde, Alessandro Nivola
Marie Gillain, Emmanuelle Devos

"Coco is extravagant" says Gabrielle Chanel (Tautou) when someone suggests she should start using that name instead of her own.
This reaction and defense towards simplicity might have described the career of the woman who changed the course of fashion in the twentieth century.
The house of Chanel became known for its sleek, simple luxury and even pieces from the latest collections include the essence of what Coco intended when she started designing hats.
Anne Fontaine's biopic, like most movies of its kind, relies heavily on the audience's conception of the famous person in question.
This also gives the actors playing them the liberty to interpret them as they wish before the time when they became famous.
In such a manner Tautou makes out of Coco a fierce, strong woman who had no problem saying the first thing that came to her mind while smoking a cigarette.
Long before she became the pearl and tweed clad goddess of fashion/Nazi criminal, Tautou creates her as a businesswoman.
During her youth we see her singing in cabarets, but actually just looking for a man to look after her. She strikes gold with the millionaire Étienne Balsan (Poelvoorde) who becomes her protector. It's in her stay in his manor where she also meets Englishman Arthur "Boy" Capel (Nivola) who became the love of her life.
And so the movie consists of scenes where Coco delivers potent one liners, wears men's clothes and eventually realizes she might just have a knack for fashion.
Fontaine remains absolutely reverential and reveals little about Chanel making the movie a rather lazy enterprise that relies essentially on the title cards that appear before the end credits.
Those who have no idea what Chanel accomplished will leave the theater feeling cheated and those knowledgeable of her career will just feel teased.
Tautou does her best to make this woman engaging, but her performance remains on a very superficial level and plays her like the rags-to-riches, by way of social climibing, heroines we've seen a million times before, as if she has forgotten she's playing the woman who once said that "in order to be irreplaceable one must always be different."

A Christmas Tale ***1/2

Director: Arnaud Desplechin
Cast: Catherine Deneuve, Jean-Paul Roussillon
Anne Consigny, Mathieu Amalric, Melvil Poupaud
Hippolyte Girardot, Emmanuelle Devos, Chiara Mastroianni
Laurent Capelluto, Emile Berling, Thomas Obled, Clément Obled

Junon Vuillard (a truly splendid Deneuve) has been diagnosed with a form of degenerative cancer, she needs a bone marrow transplant that might aid her or kill her.
Her husband Abel (Roussillon moving and warm) invites their whole family to come together for the first time in years and celebrate the holidays. But this brings trouble with the return of the prodigal son Henri (Amalric who is brilliant) who was banished years before by his older sister Elizabeth (Consigny) who's dealing with her son Paul's (Berling) suicide attempt.
There's also an uncomfortable love triangle between their youngest brother Ivan (Poupaud), his wife Sylvia (a sparkling Mastroianni) and their cousin Simon (Capelluto). Plus Henri's new girlfriend Faunia (Devos who injects the film with a delightful sort of selfaware humor) who is Jewish and refuses to participate in Christian celebrations.
With as much balls as patience, director Desplechin puts all these people under the same roof, along with their feuds, secrets, genetic troubles, illnesses and inner demons, for the space of four days with some brilliant, unexpected results.
"A Christmas Tale" could've easily turned into one of the following: the rehearsal for a reality show, one of those quirky dysfunctional family dramas that rely heavily on eccentricity or one of those sappy American dramas where forgiveness and enlightenment come to the melody of Bing Crosby.
What this film turns out to be is something quite different; an amalgam of sorts of film styles, self conscious references, acting methods, moods, colors and emotions, something that sounds chaotic but actually makes more sense than it should and feels right because it manages to represent the tension that arises whenever families come together.
Sometimes it feels as if Desplechin himself doesn't want for these people to solve their problems (which he probably never intended to do), because instead of uniting their themes, he stresses out how different they are.
Therefore Consigny's scenes, some of which involve an analyst, feel extracted from a Bergman play, Poupaud's have picaresque Truffaut strokes, Amalric's seem to be have been written by Moliére on steroids and a particular scene involving Devos and Deneuve practically screams Hitchcock.
He grabs them, splits them in unorthodox ways, puts them together like he wishes, breaks the fourth wall constantly and even has time to include flashbacks, shadow theater, a wonderful Angela Bassett reference, Charlton Heston shouting in French and an improvised play before dinner. How this odes to individuality play together beautifully like a choir is one of the many miracles in Desplechin's Christmas.