Butler's Cinema Scene

Dominic West, Keira Knightley

“COLETTE” My rating: B  

111 minutes | MPAA rating: R

It would be easy enough to pigeonhole “Colette” as a bit of feminist backlash against male privilege and arrogance.

After all, the real-life tale of Nobel Prize-winning author Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette reads like a cautionary manifesto. Her earliest literary triumphs were published under the name of her husband; it wasn’t until she broke sales records and began to resent her anonymity that she laid claim to her work (though it took a court battle).

Writer/director Wash Westmoreland (“Quinceanera,” “Still Alice”) and his collaborator Richard Glatzer focus their film on the marriage of young Sidonie (Keira Knightly) to roue-about-town Henry Gauthier-Villars (Dominic West), an older fellow who under the pen name Willy edits a variety of publications.

Henry  is a womanizer, a big spender, an inveterate gambler, and he isn’t above sticking his own name on the pieces he has struggling writers churn out for his magazines. He flirts constantly with women and bankruptcy, yet manages always to live way beyond his means.

As “Colette” begins our heroine is a country girl, pretty but untested in the ways of the big city.  Henry, an army buddy of her father, visits frequently and initiates an affair with the teenager; ere long they’re married and living in Paris where she gets a quick education in sex, society and her husband’s brigandish approach to letters and commerce.

Denise Gough, Keira Knightley

At Henry/Willy’s insistence, Sidonie writes a first-person novel about schoolgirl Claudine and her sexual awakening.  On one level it’s a collaboration…Henry supplies certain salacious plot points and tightens up his wife’s prose, but most of the real writing comes from Sidonie and her own youthful memories.

Published under Willy’s byline, Claudine a l’ecole becomes a smash.  Soon Sidonie finds herself grinding out three sequels.  When she doesn’t feel like writing her husband locks her in until she produces a few pages.

At the same time Henry nudges her into exploring her sexuality with other women — he doesn’t consider his wife’s affair with another female as at all threatening.  Sidonie’s first big lesbian crush is with an American heiress (Eleanor Tomlinson)…though she feels betrayed when she discovers Henry is hitting that, too.

One of her most enduring relationships is with a cross-dressing noblewoman (Denise Gough), with whom she embarks on a stage career once she puts Henry behind her.  By this time she’s writing under her own name: Colette. (Among her latter works was Gigi, which spawned the popular film musical.)

“Colette” works because Knightley and West provide us with a nuanced portrait of a turn-of-the-century marriage, when women’s roles were changing even as male dominance reigned supreme.

Henry might sound like an utter cad — in many respects he is — but West makes of him a most charming cad, the sort of fellow who’s so entertaining that even his long-suffering wife can’t help but forgive him (at least until she can’t any more).

This is key, for if we can’t appreciate Henry’s boyish enthusiasms and live-while-the-living’s-good attitude, we cannot appreciate why Sidonie spent a decade with him despite all the shenanigans. (The story told here has more than a few parallels with “Frida,” Julie Taymor’s remarkably insightful look at the marriage of painters Diego Rivera and Frida Khalo…not to mention the current Glen Close film “The Wife.”)

Knightley, meanwhile, gets the growth role, going from bucolic innocent to worldly woman in a series of revealing scenes.

The recreation of pre-WWI Paris is totally convincing,the atmosphere lush and the supporting performances excellent.

And this film only takes Colette up to about 1912…she would continue writing for another 30 years.  Could a sequel be in the works?

| Robert W. Butler