Knightley delivers wit and charm
Contemporary concerns dovetail nicely in Colette, a breezy 19th century biopic
All too often, 19th century costume dramas play like pure escapism; look at those nicely dressed people with their charmingly antiquated problems!
Not so Colette. While not quite on par with cutting-edge #TimesUp concerns, the story of a woman writer trying to find her voice in fin-de-siècle Paris has a refreshing sense of relevance, while retaining its breezy nostalgic tone.
Much of this comes from its star, Keira Knightley, who has worn so many corsets — her last film was one of the Pirates of the Caribbean; her next The Nutcracker and the Four Realms — that she probably has one in her wardrobe for last-minute casting calls.
For all her period-appropriate dress, however, Knightley plays Sidonie- Gabrielle Colette — she went by just Colette — as a thoroughly modern, headstrong woman. This type of performance can sometimes break the historical spell, but Knightley makes us believe it.
She can be equal parts witty and bawdy, as when a friend
laments to her husband that, now that he’s married, “the wild days are over.” She interrupts: “On the contrary, the wild days have just begun.”
But when she catches husband Willy (Dominic West) consorting with a prostitute she is put off by his excuse, which amounts to: “It’s 1893 in Paris; this is what men do!” (I’d always bought that, although to be fair it never affected me directly.) She briefly returns to her parents’ home, but when she sighs that she’d “better get used to marriage,” her mom (Fiona Shaw) has better advice: “Better to make marriage get used to you.”
She takes the advice to heart. When a chastened Willy tells her “You mean more to me that all the women of Paris put together,” she snaps back: “Have you sampled them all?” And then follows it up with this zinger: “I can read you like the top line of an optician’s chart.”
Marital bliss is soon restored after a fashion, but Colette has a new problem. Turns out that although Willy is a professional writer, she’s the one with the real talent. He finds her first novel, Claudine, “too cloying, too feminine,” but French women can’t get enough of the risqué adventures of a young schoolgirl. (Some things never change.)
Subsequent Claudine stories bankroll the couple’s lavish lifestyle — including some lesbian affairs that Willy condones or even encourages — but the jackets say the author is Willy, on the assumption that books by women don’t sell.
Knightley’s character walks a fine line here — she’s clearly happy the books are doing well, but seems equally content to bask in the reflected limelight as Willy becomes the toast of literary Paris.
It takes an act of betrayal — something at which Willy excelled — to fully raise her ire.
Director and co-writer Wash Westmoreland (Quinceañera, Still Alice) includes some lovely period details, like the scene of Willy and another guest at a party marvelling at their host’s newfangled electric lights, and the sense of social outrage when a woman dared to wear pantaloons in public. He also includes that weird conceit in which his characters speak in English but write in French, often narrating in one language while simultaneously scribing in the other.
But these are minor flourishes and even less important quibbles in this sterling biopic, the leads’ work backed by fine performers from Denise Gough as Colette’s androgynous lover Missy, and Eleanor Tomlinson as an American heiress who also shared her bed. (Willy had no concerns with either he or Colette sleeping with women, but drew the line at men.)
The film even performs a dangerous dare, wherein Willy, an amateur theatre critic, disparages a new play called La Tosca, concluding that bad theatre is like dentistry, with the audience obliged to sit in pained appraisal until the final curtain. Had Colette failed, this would have been the place for the film critic to draw the same parallel. As it is, I feel that Willy, despite a less than flattering portrayal, would have enjoyed the movie and its message of empowerment. I know I did.