Knightley has write stuff to play ‘Colette’
Keira Knightley is the perfect “Colette” for these #MeToo, neo-feminist times, and if Wash Westmoreland’s “Colette,” cowritten by Westmoreland (“Still Alice”), Richard Glatzer (“Still Alice”) and Rebecca Lenkiewicz (“Disobedience”), is too wishwashy on the subject of the pioneering feminist figure and French 20th century literary giant, and if the film also at times appears too much like a fin de siecle production of “Cabaret,” well those aren’t fatal flaws.
Knightley is still young enough to be convincing as the young pig-tailed Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette of Yonne, Burgundy, in opening scenes, arriving in Paris at the turn of the century when she marries the publisher and author Henry Gauthier-Villars (a very good and smarmy Dominic West), who is almost 20 years her senior, and once you get used to all the Parisians speaking English, we’re off to the races.
Gauthier-Villars, who if he didn’t exist would have
been invented by Gustave Flaubert, and whose nickname and nom de plume is Willy, is a writer, libertine, gambler and gourmand who enjoys bacchanalian excess and is constantly on the verge of ruin. He desperately needs new material to keep from going broke, and his charming and pretty young wife likes to write semi-autobiographical stories about her country youth with more than mildly Sapphic undertones. Willy publishes her first novel, “Claudine at School” (1900), under his name for reasons that make sound Paris publishing business sense at first.
But soon it is clear that as Colette, who would publish “Gigi,” the basis of the 1945 Lerner and Loewe musical, produces a sequel and then another, that her husband suppresses her as an artist by not allowing her to publish under her name, although he enjoys encouraging her lesbian interests.
In scenes that are typical of Westmoreland’s excessive fondness for theatricality, Colette appears in a pseudo-Egyptian music hall production in which she kisses another woman (Denise Gough) on stage (Colette also develops a fondness for cross-dressing). It’s the French demimonde lesbian equivalent of a GrandGuignol stunt, and the police shut the show down.
“Colette,” which was shot in Budapest, is an improvement upon Danny Huston’s borderline soft-core “Becoming Colette” (1991), with Mathilda May in the title role and the always watchable Klaus Maria Brandauer as Willy. Knightley holds Westmoreland’s film together, but there are times when you wonder if it is worth the effort.