Colette ** (2018, Keira Knightley, Dominic West, Denise Gough, Eleanor Tomlinson, Fiona Shaw, Robert Pugh) – Movie Review

Keira Knightley stars in director Wash Westmoreland’s Colette (2018) as French rural country girl Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette, who marries the older Willy (Dominic West). They move from the countryside to Paris and he gets her to write novels under his name. After her semi-autobiographical novels about a witty, brazen country girl named Claudine are a sensational success, Colette fights to make her literary talents known, while falling under the spell of the openly lesbian Missy (Denise Gough).

Knightley gives a capable performance, though she is too posh and bloodless and insufficiently lusty or lustful for the role. She speaks like the head girl of an English girls’ public school, so it is a surprise when we see her writing in French. Ah, yes, Colette was French! Not from Teddington, Middlesex, at all. 

I’m not suggesting she should try an ‘Allo! ‘Allo! phony French accent, just something to make her not seem so darned English. However, she improves as the movie goes on and Colette becomes more fierce and independent, and she eventually sparks up to get an impressive rage on about Colette’s rights and tastes as an independent modern, free-thinking woman and female author in an age of men.

However, Knightley is out-acted by West, who gives a shrewd, canny performance as Willy, exploring the character’s strengths and weaknesses to great effect. It is due to West that Willy becomes sad and sympathetic, bringing out his love for Colette more than his exploitation of her, so that he is not a conceited, puffed-up domineering husband monster like Jonathan Pryce’s character in The Wife, though that undermines Knightley’s turn and the message of the movie.

It is interesting that the contemporary The Wife shares similar themes and issues with the Victorian-era Colette. They make a good double bill.

Colette the film, unlike Colette the character, is on the mild and underwhelming side. It is not nearly provocative or challenging enough, and frustratingly ends abruptly, leaving lots of title cards to explain the rest of the author’s story. It feels like the third act is missing.

Though quite tasty as it plays on screen, Colette the film leaves no aftertaste, and curiously nothing much to think about or argue over afterwards. It all feels comfortably set in the long-ago past, with these particular battles about gender norms lost and won. It is picturesque retro heritage cinema, so it feels too safe and none too relevant, though still it remains interesting and fairly compelling.

Wash Westmoreland directs, writes the story and co-writes the screenplay, with Richard Glatzer and Rebecca Lenkiewicz. It all needs much more passion, more rage, more anger, more hurt and more love, and maybe a bit of sweaty sex – gay and straight – would help. Knightley’s lesbian kisses are very demure and seem awkward. She is not ideally cast, capable and game for it though she is.

Colette premiered at the Sundance Film Festival on 20 January 2018, was shown at the BFI London Film Festival on 11 October 2018, and was released in the UK on 11 January 2019.

Westmoreland previously made the 2014 Still Alice.

© Derek Winnert 2018 Movie Review

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