A #ColetteToo! biopic amidst the challenges of gender roles and literary rights, Gabrielle Colette (Keira Knightley) stars as the written word behind her husband’s fame.
It’s 1892 in Gabrielle’s parents’ countryside home of Burgundy dripping with Wisteria, her body ripe with purpose, her dowry a little less attractive. Willy (Dominic West) visits beautiful, young Gabrielle and her family bringing her a snow globe of the Eiffel tower…a message to the life she could have. Love letters follow to him: “Dear Willie, I want to wake up next to you…the day to be ours….” And so on.
Soon it’s Paris 1893 where Gabrielle and Willy whisk from one society ball to another. Candelabras abound! She doesn’t like the gaiety and nonsense of their life – shallow and exaggerated – taking her from rags to riches. Nevertheless, Gabrielle writes away in her salacious diaries, expressing her pain to paper. Ironically Willy has a Fifty Shades of Grey plot in his head, if only he could write it.
And so the familiar story begins. He’s a literary entrepreneur married to a penniless country girl who will now and forever-more earn her keep.
Perfectly cast from Showtime’s sensation The Affair, West, philanders about, justifying his behavior to Gabrielle, by reminding her he’s forfeited his inheritance for um, love. His performance…naughty, nice, familiar…it’s as if West (who carefully hides his English accent on American TV) has settled back into his British roots and should only perform in period pieces.
As Colette comes out of the closet (in many ways) and becomes a ‘type’ for women, Knightley shines in this lead role captivating the screen. This is her film and she owns in like no other movie before (not even her performance in Anna Karenina). It’s as if both Knightley and Colette are coming-of-age. Together. Comfortably settling in, Knightley scrumptiously moves from scene to scene with a confidence and maturity; a natural…sweeping through her own narrative.
But, as friction occurs with Willy demanding more plot, more spice, and less literature – why give up booze, women and gambling when your spouse can scribe away to support you – Gabrielle claims only her surname “Colette” with one scratch of a fountain pen’s black ink, blotting out her byline. There is no computer here. No backspace and delete. Everything is painfully written by hand. From here on she’ll be known as Colette. Only Colette.
There’s something to be said about an open marriage….
There’s something to be said, too, about the type of man whose narcissism replaces where creativity is concerned. Like Ralph Fiennes and Felicity Jones in The Invisible Woman, the story about Charles Dickens, or Anthony Hopkins in Surviving Picasso, the love for power, ego and words, above all else, leaves the women of their lives often shattered.
Sometimes the lover can rise to their men’s lack of accountability, just as Colette’s confidence manages to peak when the furniture is repossessed. She goes from rags to riches to rags to (hopefully) riches again.
The script by Richard Glatzer and Wash (Still Alice) Westmoreland is so sublime it should win Best Screenplay. It’s buoyantly moving from one scene to the other with the right amount of beats, lulls and hysteria. Yet, we long for more of Colette’s aftermath when she ‘hits it big.’
By the time the classic Claudine a L’Ecole (Claudine at School) is written by the most celebrated female author in French history, cliché thoughts comes to mind: “All life becomes material” and “writers write what they know” ….so, “be careful what you say, you may end up in my novel.” Wink. Four tiaras