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 19^th 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. .