"I invented my life by taking for granted that everything I did not like would have an opposite, which I would like" - Gabrielle "Coco" Chanel

It's hardly surprising that that simple logic should come courtesy of the woman who first touched upon the idea of the little black dress: practical yet potentially elegant, depending upon who inhabits the dress - or the life, for that matter - and how they accessorize it. There certainly wasn't much to like about Chanel's early years, which begin in the remote, sumptuous "Coco Before Chanel" with her father abandoning young Gabrielle at an orphanage. So before Coco could build an empire by singlehandedly transforming 20th-century fashion, the determined Gabrielle first had to go about the business of inventing her life.

Stifling just about all of the gamine twinkle that made her the darling of international cinema with 2000's "Amélie," Audrey Tautou furrows her brow and plays it grave as Gabrielle, nicknamed Coco - much to her distaste, incidentally - after a song that she and her sister Adrienne regularly perform in a saloon. Though Adrienne harbors romantic notions about salvation through romance, the black-eyed Coco is more cynical, viewing sex as a way to improve her lot. She insinuates herself into the bed of industrialist scion Étienne Balsan (Belgium's Benoît Poelvoorde, perhaps best known for "Man Bites Dog") and tries to make the most of his connections in her quest to be an actress...which, as we know, didn't exactly pan out.

A seamstress by trade, Coco reconstructs Balsan's expensive menswear into comfortable clothes for herself, and once Balsan allows the former dancehall singer to mingle with his well-heeled friends, Coco's unorthodox fashion sense gets her noticed. "You're elegant," Balsan's wealthy friend Arthur Capel (Alessandro Nivola, "Junebug") tells the initially cold Coco in the film's hottest shot, igniting a partnership that would alter Coco's romantic and financial future. Both Tautou and director Anne Fontaine (she co-wrote the script with her sister Camille from a biography by former French Vogue editor Edmonde Charles-Roux) face an uphill battle in "Coco Before Chanel" with a heroine who does nothing to endear herself to anyone. But that chilly self-preservation might be part of Coco's appeal, and Tautou does a beautiful job making us feel for a woman trying to keep emotions out of it.

The unpredictable Nivola gets to show off his lovely French, but it's Poelvoorde who stands out from the cast with his complicated portrait of Balsan, clearly enamored of Coco but not sure how to control her. (And you might recognize Gallic goddess Emmanuelle Devos from "La Moustache" as Coco's lush actress friend Emilienne.) Truthfully, though, Coco's personal relationships aren't especially interesting; we see cinematic romances all the time. The best scenes - and there are too few of them - observe as the seeds of modern style take root; a straw hat here, a striped boatneck there. We get to watch as Coco's shrewd, unsmiling eyes size up the corseted rules of fashion and her talented hands liberate them.