The Reel Review
Keira Knightley stars in this biopic about Colette, France’s most celebrated female writer and performer, who penned dozens of novels and short stories over her lifetime, among them – La Vagabonde, Chéri and Gigi. This period piece chronicles Colette’s early years – her first marriage to Henry Gauthier-Villars in 1893, their hedonistic, sexually open relationship, and her four titillating, coming of age Claudine novels from 1900-1903 that she wrote using her husband’s pen name “Willy” before she finally exerted her independence and left him in 1906.
The film is a pretty solid and straightforward tell, with the expected score, costumes and visuals of that era and excellent performances from Knightley and Dominic West (Tomb Raider), who is maddeningly good as her awful lout of a husband who frequently took advantage of and betrayed her. Director Wash Westmoreland (Still Alice) (who co-wrote the screenplay with his late husband Richard Glatzer and Rebecca Lenkiewicz) also does a nice job of showcasing the mysterious gender fluidity of Colette’s lover Missy (Denise Gough) and showing that LGBTQ individuals were capable of living happy lives, even in that more sexually-repressed era. Even so, the story never really rises above the level of a bland, hollow biography undeserving of a woman who was a such a fascinating and fierce feminist.
REEL FACTS
• Colette is the first solo feature by director Wash Westmoreland, who previously co-directed all his films with husband Richard Glatzer, who died of ALS (Lou Gehrig’s Disease) in 2015.
• It was illegal for women to wear trousers in France (and many other countries) in the early 1900s.
• Four years after her most well-known novel Gigi, Colette was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1948. Denied a religious funeral upon her death in 1954, she became the first French woman of letters to be granted a state funeral. She is interred at Père-Lachaise cemetery in Paris.
Video & Photo
