For a woman who dedicated her life to restrained combinations of black and white, Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel certainly had a colourful past. The director Anne Fontaine’s Coco Before Chanel is the more substantial of two biopics of the fashion icon currently doing the rounds. As the title suggests, the film focuses on Chanel’s early years as a young, poor but furiously stylish waif and on how the men in her life shaped her aesthetic.

A redundant and rather heavy handed opening scene shows Chanel as a solemn and soignée 12-year-old, dumped in an orphanage along with her sister by an absentee father. There’s just enough time spent here for the young Gabrielle to appraise the nuns’ austere habits with obvious approval and then we fast forward to rejoin Chanel in her twenties.

It’s here that the film’s main asset comes into play. With her brittle elegance and impatient expressiveness, Audrey Tautou is near-perfect casting as a hungry, ambitious Coco.

Anthracite eyes flashing, she condemns the fin de siècle fashion foibles of French society with biting one-line put-downs, her own understated (sometimes bordering on the dowdy) wardrobe a silent reproach against the frills and fripperies of the demimonde. Tautou is mesmerising in the role.

A seamstress by day, a cabaret singer by night, it’s immediately clear that her talents lie in the former profession rather than the latter. But Coco is a canny enough operator to realise that the nightclubs offer her opportunities that a lifetime spent beavering away with a needle and thread never would — namely, a supply of rich, foolish playboys who regard her as an attractive but disposable accessory.

Chanel, however, refuses to be discarded, attaching herself first to Etienne Balsan (Benoît Poelvoorde) and then the love of her life, the English businessman and polo player Arthur “Boy” Capel (Alessandro Nivola), all the while revelling in the life of luxury and rewriting her own humble beginnings.

But she will not marry. What is briefly touched upon by the film is the fact that Chanel is revolutionary not just in her fashion design but in the way she reshapes the roles of women. Benefactors give her a start, but the talent and ambition is all hers.

Rather staid in its approach, this film is nowhere near as fascinating and unpredictable as its subject. There are a couple of groaningly corny moments, such as a montage of furious snipping and sewing that follows the death of Chanel’s lover Capel — we get it, she channelled her pain into pattern cutting. But Tautou’s performance brings class to an otherwise conventional film. It might not have the operatic highs and lows and the wrenching melodrama of Marion Cotillade’s turn as Edith Piaf in La Vie En Rose, nor does the role require the physical transformation that Cotillade endured. But awards notice for Tautou seems assured nonetheless.

Editor's choice

• The 100 Best Films of the Decade
• 70 facts you didn't know about Marvel
• The 50 Biggest Movies Of 2010