Colette – Next weekend at Thame Cinema

WHEN: Sunday May 12, at 7 pm – UK 2018, 111 minutes, 15 certificate – directed by Wash Westmoreland, starring Kiera Knightley, Dominic West, Fiona Shaw, Eleanor Tomlinson, Denise Gough.

COLETTE was one of the most celebrated French authors of the twentieth century, nominated for the Nobel Prize, and given the honour of a state funeral when she died in 1954. But to begin with, she was Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette, a young girl from a French provincial town, waiting for her life to begin.

She has an older lover, the literary entrepeneur Henry Gauthier-Villars known as “Willy” (Dominic West). When she becomes his bride, moving to Paris to become part of the literary demi-monde, she anticipates creative and artistic adventure and romantic fulfilment. Things don’t quite turn out that way – Willy is a rake and a philanderer with no intention of setted fidelity, and Gabrielle is bored and frustrated, frequently cooped up in cramped apartments, impoverished and engaged in clerical servitude, liaising with Willy’s factory of writers churning out pulp bestsellers.

But along the way she learns to write. She produces a manuscript about Claudine, a young girl at school navigating burgeoning maturity, and Willy decides to publish it as his own work. It is a publishing sensation, becoming something of a cult, tapping into a hitherto neglected readership of young girls and women eager to consume distinctly feminine narratives. Willy recruits his wife to keep churning them out, spicing things up, feeding the seemingly bottomless public appetite for all things Claudine – but insisting on using his own name as the author.

Knightley palpably relishes this role, and is feisty and playful as a woman grappling with personal, marital and societal constraints, striving to reclaim power and autonomy from her egotistical and pompous husband. This is simultaneously a spirited and celebratory biopic, and a lush and exhilarating portrait of Belle Epoque literary Paris: the bars, the nightclubs, the salons, the characters, the scandals, and the people who moved within them. These include gender fluid trailblazers such as ‘Missy’, a noblewoman and artist who chooses to live as a man, becoming Colette’s lover.

Westmoreland’s film – his first following Still Alice – is a period piece but with a defiant contemporary sensibility, celebrating women’s voices, women’s stories, and one person’s journey towards creative autonomy. View the trailer HERE