Film
Colette
- Director
- Wash Westmoreland
- Certificate
- 15
- Running Time
- 112 mins
In an awards season awash with timely/opportunistic (delete according to cynicism) post-#MeToo dramas offering great roles for women, Wash Westmoreland‘s triumph-over-patriarchy period biopic must rank as the most zeitgeisty. If you don’t already geddit, the film’s tagline “History is about to change” rams the message home, as does the groanworthy PR hashtag #ColetteToo.
Keira Knightley is cast as French country girl Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette who marries a fella called Willy (Dominic West) and finds herself whisked into the heart of the Parisian arts scene. When Willy persuades her to write a naughty schoolgirl novel based on the saucy tales she’s told him about her youth, he publishes it under his own name and it quickly becomes a literary sensation. But having found her voice, Colette now seeks creative and sexual liberation too, making Willy’s willy redundant. The film has been criticised for being a little too middlebrow safe, but it’s light, frothy and enjoyable, with terrific performances. It’s also a lot better than Danny Huston’s Becoming Colette, which told the same story in a much more dreary style. Go here for our full review.
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