A HANDSOME, stylish UK premiere to launch the most important film festival in Nottingham for at least ten years, Anne Fontaine's beautifully directed depiction of the formative years of the legendary French fashion designer features a superb central performance from Audrey Tautou.

But, like its subject, is a little too eager to polish up some of the rougher edges of the truth.

Opening with a commendably restrained account of young Gabrielle Chanel's childhood in a Roman Catholic orphanage (with Lisa Cohen, as the 10-year-old Chanel, amusingly noting every crease and cut of every adult's clothes, from the rough garb of a coachman to the elaborate head-dresses of the nuns), the story soon moves on to more adult adventures.

Indeed, it spends most of its time showing us Tautou's severe, opinionated young beauty's affair with playboy Etienne Balsan, a seemingly vulgar and uncultured socialite who lives only for wine, women and racehorses but whose fortune provides a fabulous living for the girl from the poorhouse.

It is Balsan who unwittingly introduces Coco to the love of her life, English polo player Arthur "Boy" Capel, with whom she embarks on a simultaneous, but far more passionate, relationship. Balsan, whose friendship she maintains throughout her affair with Capel (she still lives with him), and Capel become key figures, providing the financial backing for the setting-up of her embryonic fashion business, which soon establishes her hats and wonderfully cut androgynous clothes as the talk of Paris.

But Chanel, who later created an entire fictional backstory for her own early life to wipe out the "shame" of her childhood poverty, would have surely approved of some of the retouching that's gone on here, perhaps fittingly for a film made with the co-operation of the Chanel empire.

A large number of her siblings have simply been airbrushed out of the story and while the film implies that she lived her later years in splendid romantic isolation after Capel, she had numerous affairs, allegedly including one with composer Igor Stravinsky (the subject of Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky, Jan Kounen's rival film, which opened this year's Cannes festival) and another, very unpopular in her home country, with a German officer during the Nazi occupation of France.

But it all looks great, with stunning acting from Tautou, Alessandro Nivola as Capel and - especially - Benoit Poelvoorde as Balsan, a tremendous performance which becomes increasingly complex and interesting as the story progresses. The film looks as splendid as the creations of Chanel itself and, at times, is as poignant and evocative as Alexandre Desplat's subtle, impressive score.

* Coco Before Chanel can be seen at the Broadway from July 31.

SEAN HEWITT