Review: Colette

Colette (15)

UK/USA 2018  112 mins  Dir: Wash Westmoreland  Cast: Keira Knightley, Dominic West, Denise Gough, Eleanor Tomlinson

In a less enlightened time, a dastardly cad passes off his wife’s artistic creations as his own, insisting that work produced by women doesn’t sell. Enjoying the fame and spoils of commercial success, he then pressures her to churn out more until she rebels. Sounds familiar? Yep, we last saw this true story told by Tim Burton in his under-appreciated Big Eyes, with a wolfish Christoph Waltz bullying Amy Adams to mass produce her chintzy art. Still Alice co-director Wash Westmoreland’s Colette is a very different film, being a glossy prestige costume drama biopic heavily signposted as a Story for Our Times and positioned for awards glory. Perhaps because of this, it’s an oddly passionless, somewhat bullet-pointy affair despite strong performances, especially when put up against the awards season’s other period love triangle yarn with a sapphic twist – the delightfully lusty, bawdy and unrestrained The Favourite.

Returning to corsetland, Keira Knightley is well cast as Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette, an innocent yet bright and wilful country girl from rural Burgundy, who cops off with sophisticated, beardy family friend and notorious libertine Henry Gauthier-Villars (West). Despite being 15 years her senior, he promptly marries Colette and whisks her away to Belle Époque Paris, where this self-styled literary entrepreneur haunts salons packed with ghastly bores (“shallow and pretentious,” she sniffs, bullshit detector a-quiver) while employing a team of ghostwriters to churn out his own work under the brand name of Willy. The pompous, philandering old goat initially encourages Colette’s own autobiographical writing but dismisses it as “too feminine, too cloying”, requiring “more spice, less literature”. Only when the bailiffs turn up following a downturn in fortunes does he recognise its commercial potential, publishing her sexed-up naughty schoolgirl novel Claudine à l’école under his own name. This swiftly becomes a literary sensation, proving especially popular among young women.

Knightley is in her element here as the sharp-witted and gifted Colette, who gradually takes control of both her authorial voice and sexuality, though the ever-excellent Dominic West is more than a match for her, bringing a likeability to his role as the hypocritical, dissembling Willy, who lip-smackingly endorses her lesbian affairs – especially if it means he can pop round for a swift legover with the same woman on alternate days – but draws the line at any potential dalliances with other men. The screenplay, by Wash Westmoreland and his late husband Richard Glatzer, also gifts West many of the funniest lines, which serve to humanise Willy even as he becomes an eminently hissable villain for irate trans activist audiences when he sneeringly describes Colette’s scandalously-trousered lover ‘Missy’ as her “ladyman friend”. Winningly played by Denise Gough, Missy is the Marquise de Belbeuf, who’s hailed in some quarters as a transgender pioneer – though this has been disputed. A less successful performance is that of Poldark‘s Eleanor Tomlinson, essaying an especially ripe Louisiana accent as the wealthy heiress object of Colette and Willy’s mutual desires.

As one might expect, the script is pleasingly non-judgemental about homosexuality, which is never depicted as a source of trauma. But, while never less than enjoyable, Colette might have benefited from being more raunchy and less polite given its subject matter. Indeed, many of the most interesting incidents in Colette’s racy and eventful life occurred after the somewhat rushed end credits. A cynic might even suspect that episodes have been omitted for proving inconvenient to the current fad for judging historical figures by contemporary liberal values. At the age of 47, for example, Colette seduced her 16-year-old stepson, which makes her a predatory paedo in modern tabloid parlance. Don’t expect to see that biopic anytime soon.