RACY TRUE TALE STALLS AS KEIRA JUST PLAYS KEIRA
LIKE Marmite Keira Knightley has a tenus dency to divide people. There are those who think her lustrous beauty is outshone only by her prodigiou acting ability, and others who consider her, as an actress — not a great deal more than a pretty face. I subscribe to the latter view. All her familiar mannerisms — led by the giggle, followed by the pout — reduce each part she plays to just another manifestation of Keira. Of course, plenty of great movie stars are always conspicuously themselves. Si
Michael Caine is their generalissimo. But they radiate a charisma which makes it a strength, not a flaw. I don’t think Ms Knightley does.
All of which explains why I think this is an interesting film telling a worthwhile, true story — that of literary sensation Colette, whose racy novels were all the rage in belle
epoque Paris — which would have benefited from a stronger actress in the title role.
As for the narrative, our heroine grows up in provincial France until she is whisked off to Paris by a family friend, one Henry Gauthier-Villars (Dominic West), who is himself a novelist, writing under the pseudonym Willy.
Her new, much older husband is dashing but serially unfaithful and feckless. It is not his literary efforts but hers, initially published in his name, which bail them out of their financial mess. Gradually, she emerges from Willy’s considerable shadow — and out of the bedroom in which he locks her to force her to write — to assert herself professionally, socially and sexually.
She takes female lovers, with Poldark’s Eleanor Tomlinson luminously miscast as one of them, Georgie. Eventually, she ends up with Missy, played by award-winning Irish actress Denise Gough, who is what we might now call trans-gender. Indeed, director Wash Westmoreland makes no attempt to suppress the modern parallels.
In my view, it’s not too fanciful to see Colette as an antecedent of the #MeToo movement, and in that sense, I suppose, this is a timely release.