Audrey Tautou Too Pretty4Coco

 

Not requisite “BITCH LOOK:” Audrey Tautou at NYC premiere of Coco before Chanel

It’s been almost a decade since Amelie. Somehow the ghost of that pixie played by Audrey Tautou, obsessed with a boy she sees in a restaurant and who steals her father’s garden gnome, persists.  This ghost also creates a comical turn for Tautou in her latest flick, Coco Before Chanel, by director Anne Fontaine. The film opens today in the USA.
You can almost burst out laughing as the camera zeros in on Tautou’s concentrated visage as she stares at the white cuffs of the nuns at the orphanage. Or how about when she runs her small hands over a cashmere sweater and shouts, “Oh, what is this fabric?” The biggest ridicule rests with her finding inspiration in fishermen as they pull their nets: “Those jerseys, the way they hang, so simple!”
Not that she herself is a simple actress. The prejudice rests in her physical form. Anthony Lane, the theater critic for the New Yorker put it best.

“Those inky round eyes and that pixie mug insure that hers are the features, poor thing, that social anthropologists will eternally reach for when asked to illustrate the term gamine. Or mignonne. She does her best to capture the sullen grit of the young Coco, and the sour distaste she felt for those off whom she sponged; but it’s hard to jut your jaw when you don’t have much of a jaw, just a perfectly rounded chin, and the adamantine hardness of Chanel—not just in her bone structure and bearing but in the elimination of all fuss from her couture and all wasteful palaver from her soul—is probably beyond an actress as winsome as Tautou.”

Basically, the poor girl got screwed because she’s too CUTE. Ms. Coco was one sharp featured, rough riding, chain smoking broad. Not at all like the sweet wide eyed Tautou. C’est la vie!

The lovely Audrey, sweet as apples at LA premiere