The French fashion icon Coco Chanel has been the subject of two biographies in two years. In "Coco Before Chanel," Audrey Tautou portrayed the impoverished young designer with a taste for monochromatic menswear. While we await the inevitable "Coco: The War Years," we can compare and contrast the gamine Tautou with the tougher Anna Mouglalis, who plays the powerful diva entangled with an equally iconic figure in the speculative romance "Coco Chanel and Igor Stravinsky."

It's a little black dress of a movie, an elegant hint of something sensual that is ultimately denied to us.

It doesn't bode well for a love story when the most passionate scene is the first, before the characters meet. In 1913, the exiled Russian composer Stravinsky (Mads Mikkelsen) premieres his balletic "Rites of Spring" in Paris. The modernist music and neo-primitive dancing incites a riot of disapproval but, in the audience, Chanel is rapt.

Seven years later, Chanel is successful enough to offer her home and patronage to the proud, dour Stravinsky, who moves into her starkly stylish manse with his tubercular wife, Katarina (Elena Morozova), and four children.

Chanel and Stravinsky make little effort to conceal their affair from Katarina. Yet the sex scenes are tony rather than torrid — there's more fire when the lovers debate the merits of their respective professions. With insufficient spark and a wavering trajectory, the finale fizzles.