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.
Butler's Cinema Scene 