Apparently Coco Chanel was horrified by the casting of Katherine Hepburn to play her in a 1969 Broadway musical. She had wanted the other Hepburn, Audrey. Thirty years later in Coco Avant Chanel, it seems that she got her wish. This century's Audrey, Audrey Tautou, gives a near flawless performance as an ambitious, unorthodox young Chanel.

We first meet 'Coco' as the young Gabrielle Chanel, when her father is abandoning her and her sister at an orphanage. The story then skips ahead several years to when Chanel is working as a seamstress in Moulins, but wanting a career as a singer. It's in the cabaret clubs that she gets her nickname Coco, and meets the wealthy Etienne Balsan (Benoit Poelvoodre). After becoming Balsan's mistress and a permanent fixture at his country estate, Chanel chafes against the hypocritical morals and tight corsets of upper class society, designing loose dresses and unadorned hats for friends. But it's the arrival of the self-made English industrialist Arthur "Boy" Capel (Alessandro Nivola) to the estate, and their ensuing love affair, that helps Chanel fully realise her creative potential.

As well as bearing an uncanny physical resemblance to Chanel, Tautou brilliantly expresses her pride and fragility with almost imperceptible ripples across her smooth countenance. While Nivola gives a good performance as her restrained lover, it's Poelvoodre who matches Tautou scene for scene, making Balsan an intriguing mixture of brute, proprietor and friend.

The history of Chanel's relationships has been compressed, and the love triangle plot slips into melodrama occasionally, but director Anne Fontaine generally keeps a steady hand on the action, returning to Chanel's analysis and experimentation with clothes. The sequences of her working with fabric are rightfully imbued with the passion and tenderness of any love scene.