Life In The Parisian
Literary Set Circa the Belle Epoque-Kiera Knightley’s Biopic “Colette” (2018)-A
Film Review
DVD Review
By Leslie Dumont
Colette, starring Kiera
Knightley, Dominic West, 2018
There was always
something fascinating about the Belle Epoque, so-called in France the site of
the film under review, Colette, in the
late 19th century before World War I destroyed all illusions, or
almost all illusions that civilization, Western civilization anyway was heading
onward and upward in a permanent progressive way. An age when, for the times,
anything went at least in the major cities and at least in places like Paris
which was the epitome of the major trends. It was an age, the age in the United
States called the Age of the Robber Barons or the Gilded Age when previous moral
and economic norms went out with the wind. An age when a frisky young writer
like the woman who became known by her last name as Colette could show her
stuff. A time too when a woman like Colette could blossom (some would say
blossom as a writer and be any women’s whore at the same time but that be
something of an anachronism).
Colette, played by
British actor Kiera Knightley last seen in the seemingly endless Pirates of the
Caribbean films now played out, more than played out, is a young women from the
sticks, from out in the country who has caught and been captivated by one
nefarious and unscrupulous in the end Willy, played by Dominic West, who fancies
himself a literary entrepreneur. Really a middle-man for others who write for
him and he reaps the glory-and dough. Before long he beds and weds Colette,
brings her to Paris and finds that she can write, can write under his
imprimatur. The ups and downs of the literary life get something of a workout
here as Willy promotes the hell out of his new-found product. That will work
for a while although in the end in a panic over some bad financial decisions he
will go down the tubes.
That is the high society
and high literary part, but this film is also a let’s call it coming of age,
coming into one’s own sense for Colette as she stirs through the Parisian
social jungle. She was rumored to have had an affair with the demonic painter
and epitome of the period’s decadent moral climate Toulouse-Lautrec although I
could not pin that down. Rumor, this from Sarah Lemoyne who has a by-line at this
publication and who recently did a piece on Lautrec and another love affair of
his with the painter Frida Kahlo, that he was shacked up with Colette and her
lesbian lover Missy after having seen them at the Moulin Rouge, his regular
hang-out and been the only man in the crowd who did not boo or go loco when they
kissed as part of their stage act to pay their rent. So take that for what it
is worth.
Perhaps fifty years ago
the part of the film about that torrid love that dare not speak its name, that lesbian love would have been
either left out or done by allusion. Some convenient Boston marriage trope
although Missy running around in men’s clothing was a coded reference among the
upper classes that she was a daughter of Sappho. Colette as it turns out was at
least bisexual, although the tender moments of the film tend toward those lesbian
affairs and so the film deals with that aspect of her life as well as her going
out on her own as a stage performer with her lover in a not well-received
revue. (The Moulin Rouge the place where Willy had dropped all his cash trading
in on Colette’s name and where she allegedly caught Toulouse’s eye) How much of
this is based on fact and how much on the cinematic needs of a period biopic I
don’t know but I found that aspect of the film much more compelling that the
wrangling and anguish Colette had to deal with from the ruthless and desperate
Willy who really was a scoundrel and ne’er- do-well. A reading of a little of Colette’s
literary output though makes me wonder what the hoopla was about on her novels but
so it goes. Well done job by Knightley and West in the acting department here. .
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