The movie’s saving grace is its performances—two of them, though not the most obvious pair. Clad in razor-cut monochrome with waist-length pearls swinging as she walks, Anna Mouglalis plays Coco Chanel as a living icon, an elemental force who is her own best advertisement. There’s no depth to the characterization, but its contours are as sharp and engrossing as an Art Deco print.
The other standout turn isn’t from Mads Mikkelsen, whose pinched, severe Stravinsky is a caricature of Eastern European repression, but from Elena Morozova as his long-suffering wife. Sallow and tubercular, she swallows hard when Chanel invites her husband to stay in her spare house, an act of patronage that also places him within arm’s reach of another woman. Morozova knows when their affair begins, perhaps even sees it coming before he does, but endures it, partly out of masochism, and partly because it feeds into his work. Stravinsky’s faithful copyist as well as the mother of his four children, she’s the only character in the movie who exists for something other than herself (While Chanel and Stravinsky’s bed sessions are passionate, they aren’t loving.)
In the end, Coco & Igor offers little insight into its titular titans of modernism. There’s little understanding of their individual aesthetics, let alone how they (hypothetically) informed each other. A flash-forward to the end of their lives suggests that the memories of their relationship remained potent long after its brief tenure, but the movie neither proves nor argues that thesis.
