Starring Mads Mikkelsen and Anna Mouglalis. In French and Russian with English subtitles. Unrated. Opens Friday, June 25, at the Ridge Theatre

Coco Chanel and Igor Stravinsky begins with a spectacular recreation of the scandalous 1913 debut of the great composer's breakthrough work, The Rite of Spring, during which fistfights supposedly broke out between passionate defenders of the boldly dissonant ballet score and Parisian theatregoers panicked by its primitive newness.

Dutch director Jan Kounen, working from the script he and Chris Greenhalgh helped adapt from the latter's historically fanciful novel, injects the thrilling music and a richly imagined vision of Sergei Diaghilev's dance troupe into a fusty social milieu already spooked by intimations of the coming world war.

As mythologized as the day Bob Dylan plugged in his Stratocaster at the Newport Folk Festival, the event is likewise a key moment in 20th-century culture. And viewers can't be blamed for feeling some disappointment when the tale dwindles to the conjectural affair between its bespectacled hero (handsome Dane Mads Mikkelsen, who resembles Stravinsky the way Daniel Craig looks like George Gershwin) and fashion icon Chanel (tall, skinny Anna Mouglalis, taking over from petite Audrey Tatou, who played the nascent designer in Coco Avant Chanel).

When the famously self-contained fashionista invited Russia's most dazzling composer to live at her villa after the war, he brought along his ailing wife (here played by Yelena Morozova) and their four children. In the film's telling, the creative titans indulged in an affair that was less seduction dance than a lethal pas de deux between smoke-clouded praying mantises, against a stark, art-deco background.

This is interesting, if somewhat chilly, stuff. And it's ravishingly constructed. Too bad we lose sight of the romantically hesitant Igor's beavering ways with song. The movie somehow misses the phenomenal successes of Petrushka and The Firebird in the same period, as if Rite was all he wrote.

Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky is the second film of the Vancouver French Film Festival.