Review of Colette (2018) by Alan W — 22 Dec 2018

Wash Westmoreland's new film begins just like another Jane Austen adaptation with an English countryside cottage where Keira Knightley's girly Colette lives with her parents but that couldn't be further from the truth as this is actually France and in the next scene, we see Colette and Willy, a Parisian writer played by Dominic West, frolicking seductively in the haystack in a barn nearby.

Based on the life of the most famous French female novelist of the 19th century, her story and how it develops will surprise you if like me you've not heard of her before. After the couple got married and moved to Paris, she begins writing a series of very popular books about a semi-autobiographical character called Claudine which were credited only to his name.

Fortune and fame follow and open up young Colette to a more Bohemian lifestyle as their lives soon deviates from each other. Infused with a sense of French sexual laissez-faire and gender challenging sensualities, Westmoreland's film is nicely composed but feels oddly detached and a little TV-movie flat, despite a witty and relevant script, that he co-writes, that sparks occasionally with its sharp observations about popular fashion and the empowerment of subjugated women that's as reflective of society back then as it is the one we live in nowadays.

Ultimately, the film is all about the central performances. Knightley is fearless and convincing as the maturing and confident beyond her age Colette while West's Willy is played like a 19th century Noah Solloway (from his own TV show The Affair) crossed with P.

T. Barnum. The result is undoubtedly watchable because of them but also somewhat fluffy, with the film seemingly petering out towards the end.