No one really knows,  as the basis for a two-for-one biopic, or at least some highbrow slash-fiction offshoot, why the hell not? And if we do have to watch the coupling of these 20th-century greats, why not cast some fetching actors? Anna Mouglalis (also to be seen as Juliette Gréco in Gainsbourg) looks less like Coco Chanel than one of her models, and Mads Mikkelsen looks awfully gym-pumped for an impoverished Russian who's spent most of his time sitting at a piano, but then the whole movie has the immaculate visual gloss of a Chanel advert, which is no bad thing. The story goes one further, though, and suggests Chanel and Stravinsky's liaison, in the summer of 1920, was a sort of alchemical reaction, which inspired both of them to greater artistic heights.The camera swoops constantly either side of the curtain to capture the rising pandemonium in the auditorium, the frustrated Nijinsky shouting out the beat to the dancers because they couldn't make sense of the music, Diaghilev turning the house lights up and down, Stravinsky storming backstage. And all the while Chanel sits impassively in the audience, lapping up the mayhem like a cat. When they actually meet, seven years later, Chanel offers the penniless composer and his family the use of her palatial country house – with benefits a tacitly acknowledged extra. It's almost an anticlimax when they inevitably get down to business, but the presence of Stravinsky's dying wife, Katarina, adds more than a note of unease. The very modern Chanel is brazenly unapologetic about it all, and Katarina powerlessly acquiesces, acknowledging that her husband's music "has more passion", just as Chanel is moved to create her pioneering No 5 perfume.
For the most part, though, the proceedings are conducted with cool reticence, both to convey the sheer modernity of the affair, and to avoid straying too much from the official biographies. Picking up almost where last year's Coco Before Chanel left off, the film opens with a bravura recreation of Stravinsky's notorious premiere of The Rite of Spring in Paris in 1913.
Ultimately, the affair develops into a brittle battle of artistic wills. "I'm as powerful as you," Chanel tells Stravinsky. "You're not an artist, you're a shopkeeper," he replies. It's an inviting question. How do you compare such disparate talents? How do you compare smell with sound?