Colette

It’s easy, this Writing lark. All you need to do is sit down at an escritoire, take out a ruled cahier, unscrew a silver fountain pen, dip it into an ink bottle and off you go. A torrent of words will flow from your pen and before you know it, you have produced a best seller with nary a crossing out and barely a blotch on the paper.

Or, at least, that is writing a la Colette. None of this staring at a blank wall in vain search of inspiration, the false starts, the screwed-up paper, the increasing sense of frustration and futility, the odd curse. But then, perhaps, that is why she was a first-class writer and I am a journeyman. Of course, portraying the act of writing is pretty tricky in a film. It is essentially a boring and personal act with little opportunity for drama and without care the director could have ended up with something akin to the delicious Monty Python Writing a Novel sketch https://youtu.be/ogPZ5CY9KoM

That danger was successfully averted but Washington’s Colette, starring Keira Knightley as the eponymous heroine and Dominic West as the unctuous prick, Willy, bears all the hallmarks of the kind of agenda ticking discernible in the Favourite. Colette was the talented one of the pair, Willy being the self-styled literary entrepreneur whose failures spectacularly outweighed his successes. There is no question that Willy exploited Colette’s literary talents as well as inveigling her in an abusive relationship, mental if not physical. He presented her works as his own, milked the praise and acclaim of Parisian society and took his lion-share of the money. For a time Colette was prepared to put up with it but then fought back.

What we have here is a story that feeds straight into the #MeToo agenda, an abused and exploited woman fighting back and getting her just desserts. Of course, she brings Willy down and gets to bask in her own well-deserved fame – she wrote and published over 30 books and was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1946 – and lived what may be termed a racy lifestyle.

And that brings to the other major theme of the film which satisfies the voracious LGBTQIA agenda. In her struggles with Willy, Colette discovers her Sapphic side, hooking up, initially, with a bored millionaires from Louisiana -is there any other sort? – whom, she discovers, Willy is also screwing, and then with a transgender pioneer, the Marquise de Belbeuf, her long-term lover, Missy. Willy’s selling of the rights to the popular Claudine series behind her back is the final straw for Colette and kick-starts her career in Vaudeville.

That said, the film was more successful and interesting than The Favourite, after all, there was a more interesting story to explore, and Knightley and West pull off fine and convincing performances. There was no annoying soundtrack and although the cinematography, at times, looked as if it had been shot by someone with advanced cataracts, a deliberate effect I assume, it was a pleasant way to spend a couple of hours.

The ten of us who were in the cinema left satisfied.