Colette Before Colette

Colette a film by Wash Westmoreland.  With Keira Knightley, Dominic West, Fiona Shaw, Denise Gough.  ***1/2

Colette was a great hero of mine when I was young, because she wrote both fiction and nonfiction, she always seemed to write about herself, she wrote about transgressive subjects, and she seemed to discover herself through writing.  She made writing into a spiritual practice, though she wouldn’t have used that term herself.  My great professor Wallace Fowlie told me that Colette wrote the most beautiful and pristine prose of any French writer.  But her real career began, I thought, with The Vagabond; I’ve never read her earlier work, when she was part of the writing factory created by her first husband Willy.  In a way he made Colette into a writer, in that he encouraged or in some cases forced her to write those early novels.  But it was only in breaking away from him that she became who she really was.

I understand that the early part of her life is the best subject for a film.  The older Colette, the true wisdom figure, the great writer, spent most of her time sitting around writing.  That doesn’t make for much of a movie.

Colette is played—somewhat jarringly for me—by the perpetually youthful Keira Knightley, who is so recognizable herself that I had trouble accepting her as Colette; on the other hand, she is supposed to be a mere twenty years old when she marries her already famous husband Willy, and she seems convincingly that young, though she is actually 33.  Willy (Dominic West) is portrayed as a professional fraud, a man fourteen years her senior who posed as an editor and author but got other people to do the writing for him, first a couple of local hacks who were trying to make a living in Paris, and then, eventually, his young wife, known in those days as Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette.

They frequented Paris salons around the turn of the century, a world that fascinated and enchanted me when I was a young man reading French literature.  This is essentially the same world that Proust wrote about (he was two years her senior).  Willy was a notorious libertine who had affairs with other women, insisting they meant nothing to him and that Colette was the only woman he loved, the same feeble excuse men have been offering since time immemorial.  He was fiercely jealous when his young wife seemed to flirt with other men, not as jealous, and in fact faintly aroused, when she got interested in other women.  That tended to push her into the arms of women, including the Alabama born wife of a much older man, played with a dreadfully phony Southern accent by Eleanor Tomlinson (why do actors even try to do Southern accents?  They fail much more than they succeed).  That woman was certainly beautiful, and eventually attracted Willy as well; the scenes that portray their serial lovemaking are exciting.

But I found that part of the movie faintly boring.  The world of French salons seems foppish and shallow, and Willy just seems like a blowhard, so much so that I couldn’t understand why this young and beautiful woman had ever fallen for him, or why other men would write books and let him take the credit.  I never found his supposed love for Colette convincing, and couldn’t understand why they wanted to run around this way.  I think of Colette as a deep person, never imagined her frivolous youth.

The movie deepened for me, and grew more interesting, when Colette acquired another lover, a wealthy aristocrat who dressed in men’s clothing named Missy (Denise Gough).  She instantly became the most interesting person in the film for me; she knew that Colette—not Willy—had written the Claudine novels; she saw through Willy’s blowhard persona; she cared for Colette or at least admired her as a person, and though she too occupied that essentially frivolous high society world, she didn’t seem frivolous.  Theirs was the first mature relationship of the movie, and the first one I believed in (except for Colette’s relationship with her mother, which remained strong as long as the older woman lived.  But the movie doesn’t give much time to their connection).  And Missy’s gender transformation is remarkable.  It’s worth seeing Gough’s performance for that alone.

The acting and direction in Colette  are sound, and the movie handles the whole language problem in an interesting way: Keira Knightly speaks with her natural accent, and in English, but when we see her writing, while we hear her English voice over, the words appear in French.  Colette portrays that turn-of-the-century world convincingly; I’m just no longer much interested.  The Colette who interests me is the wise older woman who saw her experience from the wisdom of years.  “Look for a long time at what pleases you, and longer still at what pains you…”   To meet that woman we need to read her books.