Cat’s-eye view of a complicated couple
Dominic West and Keira Knightley star in a period piece about celebrated French author Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette.
This is not the same old saga of a gifted woman victimized by her scheming spouse, as Tim Burton’s somnambulistic Big Eyes was a few years back.
Westmoreland and his coscreenwriters, Rebecca Lenkiewicz and the late Richard Glatzer, correctly suss out that modern viewers are as eager to engage with a woman of voice and agency as the readers of the real Colette’s semi-autobiographical Claudine novels were more than a century ago in France.
Knightley’s sharp-tongued Colette is no passive victim and Colette, she’s nobody’s fool, which is not to say that her wax-mustachioed cad of husband, Henry Gauthier-Villars, a.k.a. Willy, doesn’t seek to take full advantage of her writing skills.
A good 10 years Colette’s senior, he locks his wife in her room and pushes her to pen pulp prose for young women — “More spice, less literature!” he commands — that he sells under his own name as a self-proclaimed “literary entrepreneur,” a fancy way of saying fraud artist.
But Colette, a country girl transported to the City of Lights, is just as eager as Willy to make a mark and live lavishly: “Life is ours for the taking,” she writes him, early in their courtship. The two have strong feelings for each other, in and out of the bedroom, and Willy’s wily indiscretions are so buffoonishly obvious, he’s more a villain to laugh at than to hiss.
He and Colette share a taste for libidinous forays outside the marital bed, which get sticky when they both fall for a Louisiana heiress (Eleanor Tomlinson) who sashays across Paris like an itinerant Scarlett O’Hara.
Later Colette will turn her attention, and ardour, towards Mathilde de Morny, a.k.a. Missy (Denise Gough), a gender-nonconforming artist who helps Colette explore other creative impulses, through dance and performance art.
The film presents a complicated situation, in other words, less a cat-and-mouse game and more one of two shrewd tabbies sizing each other up. The opening scene of a cat sitting on Colette’s bed in her family home in rural Saint-Sauveur, idly licking itself, hints at the feline frolics ahead.