Colette
Ten Second Review: A rather bland take on a clearly interesting story. Sadly, someone has once again buried Colette beneath the narrative they wanted to push.
A biopic of Colette is always going to feel incomplete and in some sense lacking of the full weight of her story. Rather like Bohemian Rhapsody, it will take a suspension of the need for historical accuracy and an understanding that what you will be watching is more to give a flavour of the individual than to paint you a complete image of the main character’s life. To be perfectly honest, for the benefit of its audience and the danger of spreading misinformation, the film should begin (or at least end) with that caveat.
Colette follows the story of the real life writer and actress Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette from her early twenties through to her late thirties. It encompasses her marriage to her first husband, her writing of the Claudine Series and then moves toward her relationship with the Marquis de Belbeuf.
Make no mistake about it; the story of Colette is a very interesting one and I fully recommend taking some time to read about her. As mentioned at the beginning, the problem that you’ll start to find is that there is so much in her life to talk about that you wonder why they didn’t serialise it like the Claudine Series. Her writing of Claudine l’ecole under her husband’s name, and the subsequent sequels that followed it is an intriguing tale and, while an entire film dedicated to it would still not be able to fully encompass the story, it would make for a less scattergun life story in comparison to the one we get here. They instead push through to strong-arm in a third act looking at her acting career and her relationship with Marquis de Belbeuf. It doesn’t come off as a love for the woman the film is about but instead a dry attempt and cramming in an important figure from trans history as an accessory to a floundering plot.
The result is a sanitised and fast paced look at the first half of Colette’s life that conveniently leaves out the fact that her and the Marquis broke up and she was married twice more. She also went on to write her seminal texts like Gigi and published several memoirs about living through WWII in German occupied Paris. The whole film has this very sanitised tone that makes you feel as though the good bits of the story might be being hidden and your left with this slightly off kilter film that should be an exciting tale about one of the (many) intriguing individuals of the La Belle Époque.
The acting throughout is perfectly adequate but never really gets beyond that. Knightly, as the titular Colette, doesn’t have the gravitas that you hope she would build up to and is presented as quite passive even in her angriest scenes. Dominic West as Willy, Colette’s first husband, is also okay but the hope would be that Colette should shine over him with ease and Knightly doesn’t really manage to that. Aiysha Hart in the role of Polaire (the actress that plays Claudine in the theatrical version of Colette’s book) brought the immediate sense of authority that I was hoping Knightly would have had by the end and I was sad to find out it never develops. Hart actually might have made a good choice for the main role.
I had a lot of problems with Colette, many of them (like the weird pace of the timeline and editing) I haven’t mentioned here as it would all get far too long winded and I may not be best placed to fully dissect other issues within the film. However, the film, rather like the acting, is middling and subsequently okay if you are looking for a Sunday afternoon flick. I would say, in the time it would take you to go to the cinema, sit through the ads, watch the film and go home you would have been able to read a decent chunk of The Vagabonde or a biography of Colette’s life. Either would be a better use of your time.
