[ad_1]
the trailer for Apple TV+ The new look It’s stimulating. The flashes explode. Models in exquisite dresses spin around. Janelle Monáe’s swaggering “Haute” plays. Ben Mendelsohn and Juliette Binoche, as Christian Dior and Coco Chanel, cast smoldering glances at the camera. “Parisian haute couture could influence how thousands of ordinary women dream and live,” proclaims Glenn Close, in the character of the influential harper’s bazaar Editor Carmel Snow. Fans of not only fashion, but also lush period dramas should be counting down the days until the show’s premiere on February 14.
What a shame that the 10-episode series bears so little resemblance to the ads that promote it. Nor does it fully comply with the introductory text that prepares the premiere: “This is the story of how creation helped return spirit and life to the world.” Framed as an account of Dior’s meteoric rise after World War II, The new look is, in practice, a boring, moody and bafflingly executed tour through Nazi-occupied France, guided by two of the most famous names in fashion history. The pace is slow and the characters are fine. Top-notch actors and directors are wasted. Big questions about art and politics remain not only unanswered, but largely unanswered. If the show can be said to capture any spirit, it’s one of generic wartime sadness.
The series begins in 1955. While Coco delivers witty banter to the press ahead of her first collection since Germany invaded France, Christian, the reigning king of Parisian haute couture, addresses an audience of dazzled fashion students at the Sorbonne. But the only thing he seems to want to talk about is the return of his rival. A young woman takes the microphone and asks: “Is it true that during the German occupation of Paris, Coco Chanel closed her workshop and refused to design dresses for the wives of the Nazis, while you continued designing and making money?” The moderator tries to close the question, the answer to which is technically Yeah, but Christian insists on answering. “There’s the truth,” he says. “But there is always another truth that lives behind it.”
As anyone who knows much about Chanel or Dior should know, this is an understatement. Cue the flashback to 1943, which at first seems brief but is, in fact, the true beginning of a timeline that moves painfully slowly from that third year of occupation to the debut of the House of Dior’s first collection in 1947. When We meet Christian, he is working for the powerful couturier Lucien Lelong (an underused John Malkovich), who has been bullied into supplying dresses to the Nazis’ wives and girlfriends. As dissatisfied as Christian is about serving this clientele, he has a family to support. His younger sister, Catherine (Maisie Williams), is taking on dangerous missions for the Resistance. So it’s only a matter of time before the Nazis arrest her, torture her, and send her to a brutal labor camp.
Elsewhere in Paris, in a Ritz covered in swastikas, Coco, already the doyenne of French fashion, is apoplectic because her Jewish business partners, the Wertheimers, fled to the United States and prevented her from accessing the profits from her successful Chanel No. 5 fragrance. She is also indebted to a mild-mannered Nazi named Hans Günther von Dincklage, also known as Spatz (Claes Bang), who helped free her beloved nephew André Palasse (Joseph Olivennes) from a prisoner-of-war camp. . Although she initially makes every effort to address her aversion to fraternizing with the Nazis, Coco is easily convinced to undertake a crucial mission in her name in exchange for the Reich’s offer of invoke the Aryan laws to seize the Wertheimers’ Chanel properties.
While Coco spends most of the long season running errands for the Reich and then fighting to save her reputation in Paris from Switzerland, Christian can’t focus on anything but his increasingly dangerous quest to save Catherine, whose ordeal he hands of Nazi spectators. They are made to be observed closely. As a result, his story progresses with difficulty. The idea is that he is moving through the kind of pain that afflicted so many in Europe, toward the salvation of finding the will to design again. (Some characters constantly say some version of “creation is our way forward.”) For the most part, though, we watch him sink into setbacks of various sizes, before suddenly triumphing in the end. Entire episodes revolve around his dislike of the mausoleum-like building where his patron wants to establish the House headquarters and his dilemma over whether to hire seamstresses from his more established colleagues.
“New Look” was the term Snow used to refer to Dior’s breakthrough, and Christian, who is by far the most sympathetic protagonist, is clearly assumed to be the protagonist of the show. But Coco has the most exciting plot, from wild parties to high-stakes espionage, from Nazi flirtations to incandescent tantrums. Coupled with Binoche’s herculean efforts to bring complexity to his character, that tips the balance of attention in his direction. However, all that screen time yields little information. Was it simply selfishness that made her collaborate with the Nazis, or was she sympathetic to their genocidal anti-Semitism? Creator Todd A. Kessler (Blood line, Damages) doesn’t really care to investigate. Instead, Coco’s intemperate behavior is attributed to her childhood in an orphanage and some vague notions about feminism. “Have you ever thought about what a woman has to face to survive in this world?” she demands of a Jew who fled the Holocaust.
Such superficiality is typical of this strangely uncurious series. The new look it keeps pointing out potentially fascinating aspects of the characters’ lives without ever delving into them. Dior’s partner Jacques (David Kammenos) is often present, but Kessler barely examines the relationship between gay men who lived under Nazi rule, decades before the queer liberation movement. Jacques serves to advance the plot, delivering news to Christian and, therefore, the viewer. A community of young designers that includes the men behind some of today’s most coveted brands (Balenciaga, Balmain) primarily serves as Christian’s sounding board.
Strangest of all, Kessler seems fundamentally uninterested in the art of fashion design. It’s difficult to understand what was so revolutionary about the New Look without knowing what preceded it, what the spirit behind it was or why it was successful. Aside from brief fashion shows in the first and last 15 minutes of the series, we barely see, much less hear anyone talk about, Dior’s creations. The iconic Bar suit appears several times, but you’ll learn more about its meaning in a paragraph on the Metropolitan Museum of Art website than you in the program. no one expects this be an educational program. It is simply difficult to say much about the role of an art form during and after a devastating war when justice cannot be done to the basic concepts of said art form. In that sense too, The new look It is content to skim the surface.
Beneath that veneer, the program’s construction is shoddy. The episodes feel glued together with on-screen text that provides exposition and, like a Bravo docusoap set in the 1940s, identifies supporting characters. Formless narrative arcs give directors as distinguished as titan Palme d’Or winner Julia Doucournau and Jeremy Podeswa (Station eleven, game of Thrones) little to work with. Mendelsohn, Binoche, Williams, Malkovich, Close, Bang, and Emily Mortimer (as Coco’s nemesis Elsa Lombardi) are as strong a cast as you could want, but they don’t always make sense together. Mendelsohn, 54, is more than a decade older than Dior would have been in 1947; He and the 59-year-old Binoche, whose character is a generation older than him, appear to be about the same age. This is a particular problem because Christian is supposed to represent a breath of fresh air for an industry stagnant under Coco. Williams is almost three decades younger than Mendelsohn and reads more like a daughter than a brother. She makes it difficult to suspend disbelief.
Fashion, at its best, sells irresistible fantasy. Like a cleverly edited trailer, it makes you want to see more, know more, and spend more time in its charming presence. The product is a pleasure. The illusion is of perfection. But The new looka tedious job, showing every crooked seam.