Discomposed about the scent of a woman

Coco Chanel and Igor Stravinsky alludes to a possible affair between the influential figures. Photo / Supplied

Another movie about Coco Chanel sees Mads Mikkelsen play her possible lover, Igor Stravinsky. He talks to Helen Barlow.

Outside Europe, Danish actor Mads Mikkelsen is best known as the creepiest Bond villain in years (Le Chiffre in Casino Royale). But at home he became a sex symbol, playing a renegade cop on a hit television show and remains a highly respected actor, particularly for tense family dramas like After the Wedding and Prag.

Now in Coco Chanel and Igor Stravinsky, he steps into the shoes of one of 20th-century music's most influential figures.

There's no doubting that Mikkelsen is the current go-to man for European films, and it helps that he is as adept at action as he is at drama and romance. The down-to-earth 44-year-old is too modest to claim all the credit, though.

"Danish cinema is on a wave and we're floating on it," he grins. "Denmark is where people go to when they look for foreigners."

The devoted family man - married for 22 years to choreographer Hanne Jacobsen, with whom he has a daughter, Viola, 17, and a son, Carl, 13 - has something of a wandering eye in this film. It is built on the speculative notion that the composer and the iconic fashion designer had a brief and torrid affair when he and his wife were staying in her house near Paris.

It was 1920, the year that Chanel No. 5 was born. The composer was struggling to make his name and Chanel was not yet the sensation she would become.

There is no explicit evidence of the liaison, but the film's writer-director, Jan Kounen, is unfazed.

"We are dealing with people who were real, so if you are going to capture them you should find a way to like them and understand them," he says. "No, it is never explicitly stated. But if you want the detail that makes me believe, there is a letter, signed by [ballet impresario Sergei] Diaghilev when he is Spain with Stravinsky. We know this was during the time Coco was taking up with another man and Diaghilev writes to Coco's friend, Misia Sert: 'Tell Coco not to come to Spain. Igor wants to kill her'.

"Now, someone doesn't want to kill someone if there is not passion there. I don't think for Coco it was passionate - she was in love with the music and the art - but the affair was a transition for her."

Almost a century on, it's hard for us to appreciate the shock of the new that Stravinsky was. His innovative approach to melody, harmony and rhythm remains profoundly influential and he was, like Chanel, an inventor of the modern. The film reminds us of this in an early sequence depicting the 1913 premiere performance of the ballet The Rite of Spring, whose choreography (by Vaslav Nijinsky) and costuming was almost as transgressive as Stravinsky's music. As the audience in the Theatre des Champs-Elysees howled in outrage, we see Chanel (Anna Mouglalis) in the audience, enraptured.

Seven years later, believing Stravinsky to be a like-minded artistic innovator, she invited the newly exiled, impoverished composer and his consumptive wife and four children to live in her villa outside Paris.

Mikkelsen believes Stravinsky "was torn between many different things, always starting out so beautiful, so romantic and then he goes crazy. There was something inside of him partly belonging to the present, though he wasn't like Coco, who wanted to change things. Coco was very aware of what was happening, whereas he was just composing and that's what came out".

It's an assessment Kounen shares. "Chanel was a contemporary woman back in the 20s. She owned her own business, she demanded freedom in relationships and finance. She was the first woman who made herself a brand. She created the perfume and marketed it."

As it happens, the film makes a fitting companion piece to last year's Coco Avant Chanel, starring Audrey Tautou, which looked at Chanel's early years. And asked whether the world was ready for another film about the same character, Kounen explains that the two films were in production simultaneously.

"We were in a race and they won," he says.

"But there is room for both. Biopic films have enjoyed recent success and people are always looking around for subjects."

Additional reporting Peter Calder

LOWDOWN

Who: Mads Mikkelsen as Igor Stravinsky
What: The movie Coco Chanel and Igor Stravinsky
When: Opens at cinemas on Thursday