Coco before Chanel is about Coco Chanel's love life when she was young. Problem is, the actress playing her is over 30 and she is playing someone who is about 18 or so. I think Audrey Tautou is a fantastic actress and one of the most beautiful, but she looks way too old here. If you can look past that though she plays the role very well, she has the kind of almost tomboyish beauty that makes Coco Chanel stand out. First lets get to the good parts, this film is beautiful to look at. The french countryside is delightful, makes me want to visit there sometime. I don't know much about Coco Chanel, so I can't say truthfully how accurate this film is. Not knowing much about her did not help the film, it is pretty much a fairly standard love story with the Coco Chanel name attached to it. If you didn't know she was then you probably won't find this very interesting. The story works well enough, little girl abandoned by her parents to live with her sister grows up to be a singer in a sleazy bar doing a duet with her sister. Then of course she meets a rich man who she lives with in his rich house outside Paris. Then a love triangle is introduced, and mixed in is Coco's strange sense of fashion at the time. She dresses up in clothes that people find odd, and she sometimes gives fashion tips to other women.

The fashion part is almost unimportant, the film focuses a lot on the love story with the fashion more as a background. When the fashion is there it is used more often to make Coco seem different from all the other women. Everything in this film works, but it just isn't really interesting enough if you don't know or care about Coco Chanel. It is a pleasant love story set in France with amazing scenery and a good cast. If you are looking for a nice love story that you don't need to think about too much then this will work. It just doesn't have enough to make it stand out. Like the clothes Coco eventually designed, the beauty is on the outside, but it's what inside that makes is more important. This film is beautiful and has a fair amount of heart to it, but it doesn't have much inner beauty that could have made it much better. It doesn't tell you enough about Coco Chanel to make you care about her much beyond the typical poor girl with rich man scenario. I recommend it, but I would also recommend the film Coco Chanel from 2008 with Shirley Maclaine. This film may feel more French, but the other film Coco Chanel gives a bit more depth to the character. Coco before chanel is still the superior film overall though despite it's beauty being only skin deep. If you want a pleasant romance film you can watch with your girlfriend or wife, then you can't get much better than this.

Overall I give it a 7.5 out of 10.