Movies about Coco Chanel are as timeless as little black dresses accented with strands of genuine pearls.

In just the past year, Shirley MacLaine earned an Emmy nomination for the Lifetime movie "Coco Chanel," Audrey Tautou banks her luminous "Amelie" smile to portray the designer in her early, struggling years, and a French film called "Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky" with Anna Mouglalis and Mads Mikkelsen is waiting in the wings.

"Coco Before Chanel," opening today at the Manor theater in Squirrel Hill, delivers exactly what the title promises. This is Gabrielle Chanel as a motherless 10-year-old sent to a drab orphanage run by nuns in 1893.

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'Coco Before Chanel'

3 stars = Good
Ratings explained

• Starring: Audrey Tautou, Alessandro Nivola, Benoit Poelvoorde.
• Rating: PG-13 for sexual content and smoking. In French with English subtitles.
• Web site: www.sonyclassics.com/cocobeforechanel/

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Fifteen years later, living with her sister, she supplements her seamstress work by singing in a cabaret, which is where she meets Etienne Balsan (Benoit Poelvoorde), a gentleman farmer and wealthy racehorse owner. When she turns up on his doorstep, he keeps her around for amusement and sexual satisfaction but eventually grows to care about her.

(In the movie, Chanel earns her nickname of Coco from a song but the couturier once said it was a shortened version of the French word for "kept woman.")

It's while observing and, eventually, mingling with the idle rich who never met a feather or excess bit of finery they didn't like, that Chanel begins to develop her style. She shockingly shuns corsets, favors simple straw hats instead of the chapeau confections of the day, borrows the simplicity of menswear and chooses black when others opt for color.

If she tolerates Balsan, she falls in love with an Englishman, Arthur "Boy" Capel (Alessandro Nivola). As a younger woman, Coco had insisted that "a woman in love is helpless like a begging dog."

She amends those views but, in the end, is known for her independence and impeccable eye for style. Chanel famously said, "Fashion passes, style remains."

Director Anne Fontaine acknowledges tinkering with the time line and supporting characters, some of whom are composites or resurrected for dramatic purposes. A few twists are telegraphed with near-blinking lights and there is not a whiff of Chanel No. 5 perfume or a reported affair with a Nazi during World War II.

Tautou, who increasingly grows to resemble Chanel by movie's end, wears the fashions well and allows us to see her thinking -- adapting, copying, inventing -- which is no small task.

These early years, which manage to treat the kept woman phase within the PG-13 confines, give us all the struggle and little of the joy of success. Coco's periodic stabs at freedom prove repetitive and the movie feels a bit like shadowing a master chef but not being permitted to sample the gourmet cuisine.

Still, it's a beautifully shot movie that celebrates an icon not to the manor born and whose fashions could grace any charity luncheon or red carpet today. It did what a good film should: It made me want to know more (and to sort fact from selective fiction) about its subject.

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