Michael Starr
“The New Look” sews together the rise of haute couture and questions about its superstars’ Nazi collaboration during World War II.
The Apple TV+ series traces the modern French fashion world through the eyes of acclaimed haute couture designers Christian Dior (Ben Mendelsohn) and Coco Chanel (Juliette Binoche) amidst Nazi-occupied Paris and how each of them, and their compatriots, dealt with that adversity with different shadings of complicity.
Created by Todd Kessler (“Bloodline”), “The New Look” co-stars John Malkovich as Lucien Lelonge, Dior’s first boss; Maisie Williams as Dior’s French-resistance fighter sister, Catherine; Claes Bang as Nazi operator Spatz, with whom Chanel consorts; Emily Mortimer as Chanel’s sketchy friend Elsa Lombardi; and Glenn Close as powerful Harper’s Bazaar editor-in-chief Carmel Snow.
Mendelsohn, Binoche and Malkovich spoke to The Post about their characters’ motivations.
When we first meet Dior, he’s happy working for Lelonge and somewhat ambiguous about the Nazis, designing ball gowns for officers’ wives but refusing to meet with any of them in person. But when Catherine is taken prisoner by the Nazis — and sent to Ravensbrück, a deadly work camp — Dior’s attitude toward the war changes.
Mendelsohn: [Getting Catherine back] becomes his absolute raison d’etre from that point on. She’s his most adored sibling, his everything. He’s quite a pain-in-the-ass to her, I think, but they have a nice brother-sister relationship — and when she’s gone it’s an absolute living nightmare for him. I think the relentlessness and the lengths to which he goes to get her back… changes him utterly and damages him profoundly.
Chanel has many gray areas: she bars her Jewish business partners under “Aryan Law” but closes her shop; sleeps with Spatz but sets him up to be apprehended; lives at The Ritz hotel with many high-ranking Nazis but, when she’s targeted as a collaborator, she’s flabbergasted.
Binoche: She had a sort of “I don’t give a f—k about anything, I’m just living my life and I will never be poor again, I will never be damaged by love.’” Her mindset was not moral, she didn’t have an outside way of thinking like that. I tried to understand where she came from, the big traumas behind her, and was not totally surprised that she behaved like that. Deep down she hated Germans — all French people did after World War I. There was no other way. So the fact that she got into that [collaboration] was her real reason for survival. That’s how I understood her.
Lelonge, meanwhile, justifies his dealings with the Nazis by repeatedly saying he’s keeping his workers employed.
Malkovich: We’re programmed genetically and emotionally to survive, and I think Lelonge chose to survive. He did make accommodations with the Nazis but then if you say, “No, we’re not designing dresses for your wives and mistresses” what happens then? And I think places like [concentration camps] Auschwitz, Bergen Belsen and Treblinka and the [Nazi] torture headquarters in Paris will tell you what happens then. People just survived and wanted to forget about it afterwards.
Dior, too, wants to survive, but seems ambivalent about the Nazis.
Mendelsohn: “I would be very careful of painting on a further ideological sense of his meta-thinking of [collaborating]. He’s aware of all that, he’s not thrilled the Nazis are around, he’s alive to the peril it’s just … until Catherine comes back, that wakes him up. I couldn’t say that it changes his wider view of the world.
The verdict on Chanel re: collaboration is harsh in “The New Look.”
Binoche: There are many layers to her. What I tried to find and understand, in order not to judge her from the outside… was to look at her childhood, the big trauma of her life. They were the poorest family in the countryside at a time, at the end of the 19th century, where being a woman and being poor was bad luck. Having a mother who died in front of her when she was 11, having a father who abandoned the children and never came back… I think that gave her a sort of freedom and a conqueror need to make her life something special — that she would never be poor. And that’s why she said, “Without money, you’re nothing.” She understood that, in this world, you have to fight.
New episodes of “The New Look” premiere Wednesdays on Apple TV+.
This post was originally posted by NYPost
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