‘Colette’ Gives Keira Knightley the Chance to Play a Smart, Sexy Icon

It not difficult to figure out why stories of women whose professional accomplishments have been usurped and over taken by men would be suddenly applicable to our current moment. A few years ago, we got Amy Adams in Tim Burton’s Big Eyes as a painter whose odd and singular creations depicting children with unusually big eyes (can’t imagine why Burton was drawn to this story!) were credited to her husband, creepo Christoph Waltz. Earlier this year, Glenn Close picked up Oscar buzz in The Wife for playing a woman whose husband has been selected to receive the Nobel Prize in literature despite the fact that she’s been the pen behind the man for decades. And then there is Colette, the sexiest of these films, featuring Keira Knightley as the woman behind the nom de plume Colette, the author whose books created such a stir in turn of the century French and British cafe society.

Playing Knightley’s husband — consistently the heel in these kinds of stories, is Dominic West (The Wire; The Affair) as Willy, who’s an oily, philandering dullard, yes. But credit to director Wash Westmoreland, who wrote the film with his late partner, Richard Glatzer, as well as Rebecca Lenkiewicz, that the relationship between Knightley’s Colette and West’s Willy remains sufficiently entwined and complicated through to the end.  But make no mistake, it’s Knightly who is the show here. She’s an actress who’s spent plenty of time playing the in-over-her-head spitfire in big fancy costumes, from The Duchess to Atonement to Anna Karenina, back to even the Pirates of the Caribbean movies. In Colette, she gets to have a bit more control of her circumstances, and it’s a treat to see her cut loose with such sexy, smart, provocative material.

In the early 1900s, Gabrielle Colette (Knightley) is wife to Henry Gauthier-Villars (West), who writes novels under the moniker “Willy.” Their marriage is one of partnership: she writes his novels, while he introduces her to Parisian society, which at this point was well into the Belle Epoque era. Colette takes eagerly to the bohemian life in Paris, and the books really take off with the publication of the Claudine novels, which borrow liberally from their own lives. In particular we see one romantic entanglement where both Willy and Colette are carrying on an affair with the same woman — a spitfire American married to an old French bag of money — and the ways in which the emotional entanglements do and don’t present themselves are a bit fascinating. Later, Colette will develop a romantic pull towards another woman, Missy (Denise Gough), which pulls her even farther into a kind of proto-queer social position.

Not too much is explictly made of Colette as an early queer icon, though it’s all right there for anyone to pick it up should they want to. As a cosmetic spectacle, with Knightley swanning around in men’s clothes and kissing Gough on stage in the famed Moulin Rouge (drawing howls of “DEGENERATE” in the same theater where Satine covered “Diamonds are a Girl’s Best Friend”??), it’s an invigorating good time. There’s some dramatic heft that’s missing that might’ve pushed this over the edge from good to great, but as a showcase for an actress whose gifts are still unfolding before us, it’s an easy recommendation.

Where to stream Colette