Colette is a historical biopic about Sidonie-Gabrielle Collette starring Keira Knightley as the titular character and Dominic West as her bombastic husband, Willy or Henry Gauthier-Villars, who is her liberator and exploiter. I am not familiar with the titular character, but the dynamic preview won my interest.
While Colette is a beautifully staged movie with a cast that gives their all, the actual story and editing felt abrupt and made it quite difficult to surrender to the momentum of the story without constantly being reminded that we are watching a movie. After awhile, trust that the audience will realize that we are in Paris or Saint-Sauveur. Is it truly so important to know what year it is if a story is told chronologically, and Colette’s entire life is not captured by this film? It had the accidental effect of feeling like a movie made for television.
It is a bit odd that a movie named after a historically notable woman is strictly confined to the time when she was married. On one hand, it is an easier story to tell because it comes with a natural trajectory: honeymoon, disillusionment, comfortable, dissolution. On the other hand, the movie ends up defining a woman’s life in terms of her relationship with a man and is as much Willy’s biography as hers and based on the end credits, she lived a long and full life after her with an exclusive relationship with another person for the majority of her life. Why don’t we get more of that story then? I know there are time constraints, and every detail of a life can’t be told, but choices were made regarding what part of her life mattered, and it was the part with the guy. It makes sense because without him, there would be no Colette, but it sounds like she lived a very adventurous life without him, and that life is put on the back burner.
I would not have even noticed this framing, but Colette takes great pains to avoid natural beats after early scenes of conflict and saves the majority of the conflict for the end of the movie. For example, a scene shown in the preview shows Willy locking Colette in her room to force her to write. I thought that this scene would appear later in the movie, but it appears quite early, and the subsequent scene simply shows the book in a store window that resulted from her confinement. Um, I wanted to see the conversation between the two after he unlocks her from that room. There are lots of moments like the aforementioned one in which you think that the scene is going to add some depth to the film but it bounces off in a more superficial direction and saves the meat for later.
Colette is a film more interested in capturing the feel of the times than chronicling a central figure or a relationship. As a depiction of an era, this film excels. Though the distant past was reminiscent of contemporary times in the sense that people’s lives, particularly artists, are always ahead of the curve of those in power who dictate the mores and laws of that era, viewers can easily forget it and believe that the past and its people were simpler, more old-fashioned. The film does a great job of showing how Colette’s work captured the masses’ attention and how that validation drives her to go to her furthest corners, which includes becoming a performer instead of just performing to promote her written work. Sadly the film fails to contextualize this career shift so I have no idea if it is considered a new type of performance and where does it fall within the stage spectrum.
I think that her relationship with Georges Wague needed to be developed more. In Colette, he is left at the borders of the movie and seems incidental like wallpaper, another performer that they enjoyed, but according to the movie, he ended up introducing her to a second career, which gave her the means to become independent. The film only uses it as a way to show another scandal or allow the titular character to tell us what it means to us, but we are not shown how important it is to her or to society as we are when it comes to her written work.
Colette does deserve praise for depicting relationships without being prurient. I saw Lizzie a few days before this movie, and it felt more like a lesbian historic fantasy for the audience than an organic relationship. The relationship should be more titillating for the characters within the movie than the viewers. There is one scene in Lizzie when the characters are credibly nude, but the lighting is similar to the rendezvous scenes. It feels more like a bodice ripper than a character study with the gauzy, flattering light as if the filmmakers were saying to the audience: here is your chance to see some tittays! Their sexuality and nudity felt more performative than a part of their lives.
Colette never feels exploitive even when the relationships are purely physical or lesbian, which is quite remarkable since this movie is about performers and libertines. I feel the characters’ excitement, and these scenes do not feel as if they were made for an audience. There is a depiction of a relationship between a cis woman and a trans man, and there is no afterschool special moment to ogle them or deliver a very important message advocating for or against such pairings. It simply exists as primarily a bond between the two of them. How others feel about it-other characters or the viewers-is irrelevant or tangential. I found this approach refreshing and want more movies to adopt this practice.
Sadly overall Colette is a lackluster movie that fails to fully transmit the excitement of and focus on the titular character’s extraordinary life. It may seem like a small criticism, but for a movie set in France, I don’t think there is one single French person involved in its production, which could have contributed to this film falling short. As someone who believes in representation and watches foreign films, I can definitively say that a French period film feels different from a British period film. Both are good, but there are intangible qualities to both types of films that make them enjoyable and faithful to the sensibilities of the characters that they are trying to depict. Maybe a film about a notable French woman should have at least some French people involved in the process. I understand that a part of filmmaking is to create a world that does not exist, but when it is rooted in reality, maybe filmmakers should try to make it like reality. French people have a certain je ne sais quoi and to expect that a bunch of excellent Brits can evoke the same indescribable quality is an unrealistic and impossible expectation, especially when a large part of the story is addressing sexuality and gender. This movie gets an A for effort, but a B to B- for not fully bringing the heroine’s story to life on the big screen.