Colette (2018)

The Graduate
or
"The Hand That Holds the Pen Writes History"

My name is Claudine, I live in Montigny; I was born there in 1884; I shall probably not die there.

Sidonie-Gabriel Colette's story has been taken off the book-shelf and adapted, and despite covering her years during the turn of the century (20th) from fancifully-romantic young womanhood to a sadder-but-wiser independence, could not be more timely. While being so, Wash Westmoreland's* biography of French writer known simply as Collette manages to rise above the constant threat of the stiffness of a BBC adaptation, which might have been, if they decided to tone down the life and present her as merely a Nobel Prize winning icon. Colette, you have to read between the lines.

It couldn't have been easy. Films about writers tend to be either precious when recalling inspirations for their work, or present the creative process as a magical mystery, completely unfathomable (except with voice-over). 

Colette falls into the latter category, but at least it shows a side of writing few of these things show: writing is hard work, often born of necessary...and it's not a lot of fun.

We meet Gabriel (Keira Knightley) at the age of 19, the daughter of Jules-Joseph Colette (Robert Pugh) and Adele Eugenie Sidonie (Fiona Shaw), living in a small rural town in Burgundy. The family, being once well off, is now in financial straights—they can't even provide Gabriel with a dowry. Good thing a family friend, the well-known author, publisher, critic and bon-vivant Henry-Gauthier Villers (Dominic West)—who writes under the pen-name "Willy"—finds her enchanting...and available. They whisk away to Paris to a cosmopolitan married life and where Gabrielle finds that "Willy" depends on ghost-writers for his output and he can be counted on to be unfaithful to her.

His small stable of writers rebel and finally quit, leaving them in bad consequences, given Willy's exorbitant lifestyle. Gabriel offers to write something—a novel, something that Willy is in no position to turn down. She spends hours on the project, the story of a young girl named Claudine, who, not unlike herself, grew up in Burgundy and her years at an all-girls school.  When she's finished, Willy dismisses it as fine writing, but the novel as "plotless" and beneath his standards. he won't publish it. Gabriel is crushed—the writing was hours of hard work and says she'll never do it again.

But, in a moment of frustration, with the bills mounting, Willy relents, after making some small suggestions for tinkering and spicing up...and surprise! "Claudine at School" becomes a publishing phenomenon. Everyone seems to be reading it, and Willy—whose name is on it as author—becomes the toast of the town, as Colette looks on in amazement. Along with the staggering book sales, Claudine even inspires merchandising and a popular play. Everyone assumes that the book is inspired by Gabrielle, but no one suspects—because Willy won't allow them to—that she might actually be the author.

Willy buys her a country estate, away from the city, with the profits for her. But, he has an ulterior motive. While Gabrielle spends time fixing it up and making it "just so," Willy becomes more and more agitated; he'd intended it to be a writer's retreat for Gabrielle—but she isn't writing, a problem he solves in his usual subtle way by locking her in her room until she's produced enough pages to his satisfaction.

As if he wasn't "Svengali" enough, Willy starts to become possessive and jealous if Gabrielle even looks at another man, but she dismisses the idea as absurd—she's more attracted to their lady-friends, if anything. Noting how Gabrielle is charmed by an American heiress from Louisiana, Georgie Raoul-Duval (Eleanor Tomlinson), he encourages an affair between the two, and, because he's a complete cad, decides he'll seduce Georgie, as well.

At this point, the marriage of Willy and Colette, as she begins to call herself, becomes fractious, and some of the invective starts to spill out on the pages of the books. When Colette even includes a fictionalized version of the menage-a-trois with Georgie in her third volume of "Claudine," Willy takes the opportunity to avoid a lawsuit by burning the existing copies, and then having them re-published, anyway. At one point, in discussing sequels she coyly tells him "I'm going to kill [the husband] in the next one."

Colette sets out on her own. Instead of writing, she decides to begin a career on the stage, separating herself from Willy and starting an intense friendship with Mathilde de Morny,(Denise Gough), the cross-dressing Marquis de Belbeuf. She very publicly rebels, recreating herself to her own satisfaction if to the bewilderment of the public-at-large. What's lovely about Colette is that there is no shame in it, merely the story of a woman who's been boxed in and revels in seeing just how free she can become, and on her own terms. 

Everybody's great in it, but it is Knightley that shines. She has always been an actress of intense daring, presenting her roles in mercurial flashes that hint at the conflicting emotions roiling within her. At times in the past, she has been so good, she's been scary, but in Colette, she presents a relaxed strength that finally snaps when she realizes that the nice little life she's made for herself has also become a prison...and a raw deal. After a success has been stolen from her, merely because anyone can claim words on a page, she makes herself the art, and no one can lay claim to that, good or bad.

Perhaps now, that Colette is out (although it hasn't done extremely well at the box office) we could supplant the endless adaptations of Jane Austen and maybe do the "Claudine" series as films, so that the author, so well regarded, can be most well known for something other than Gigi. Thank heavens.

    

* Westmoreland made the well-acted, but soft-pedaled and blunted Alzheimer's drama, Still Alice.