Colette review – Keira Knightley is on top form in
exhilarating literary biopic
4 / 5 stars 4 out of 5 stars.
The life of Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette makes for fascinating
drama in a nuanced and inspiring film with a luminous central performance
Jordan Hoffman
@jhoffman
Mon 22 Jan 2018 01.21 GMT Last modified on Mon 12 Nov 2018
16.34 GMT
No, not another biopic about a writer! Ugh, Keira Knightley’s
in a corset again! Get all of that out of your system now because I’m here to
tell you that Wash Westmoreland’s Colette is exhilarating, funny, inspiring and
(remember: corsets!) gorgeous, too.
The first third of this story is pretty traditional.
Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette (Knightley) is a country girl waiting to get whisked
away into marriage by the worldly literary “entrepreneur” known simply as Willy
(Dominic West). When the new bride is presented at the salons, Parisian gossips
are stunned. The notorious libertine Willy is to settle down?
While his admiration of his new bride is sincere, his
desires are not entirely stunted. But Colette (as she is not yet known) doesn’t
exactly sit idly when she learns of his infidelity. She demands honesty in
their marriage and, for a time, she gets it. She also saves the family’s
finances when her book that Willy initially rejected for publication is
reworked, branded “a Willy novel” and becomes the talk of all Paris.
Much of what makes this film so fascinating is the
not-quite-villain-but-certainly-not-hero role Willy plays. It’s a very juicy
role for Dominic West, and undoubtedly the best film performance he’s ever
given. (I’ve never in my life seen a man look dashing even while flatulating.)
The obvious read is that Willy exploited Colette in ways bordering on cruelty.
(He even locks her in a room and shouts “write!” when her initial Claudine
novel demands a follow-up.) Westmoreland’s film doesn’t exactly excuse him, but
does offer context about his contributions to Colette’s initial success as well
as a realistic portrayal of how women writers were perceived at the time.
That doesn’t make it any easier for Colette as her husband
steals all her glory. Luckily, they each have activities that keep them busy –
for a stretch, the activity is sleeping with the same woman. Willy encourages
Colette to link up with a bored Louisiana millionaire, but he doesn’t tell her
that he’s visiting her apartment on alternating days.
This leads to a kind of understanding, or at least a delay
for the inevitable reckoning. Willy’s indulgences lead to a depletion of funds,
but what ultimately bankrupts him is producing a play featuring Colette and her
new lover (the transgender pioneer “Missy”, the Marquise de Belbeuf). This
failure forces Willy to sell the rights to the extremely popular Claudine
character, and kickstarts Colette’s career as a vaudevillian.
There’s no shortage of domestic drama (and Knightley and
West do fine work with the sharp screenplay Westmoreland co-wrote with Richard
Glatzer and Rebecca Lenkiewicz) but the delay in building to a final knockout
row is something of a revelation. We so often look to the lives of artists for
meaning, but when dramatized they regularly end up being just another bit of
soap opera. Colette’s life is deserving of nuance and care, and that’s what she
gets in this film.
Keira Knightley: 'I can’t act the flirt or mother to get my
voice heard. It makes me feel sick'
Catherine Shoard
The star of Colette on Harvey Weinstein, Disney princesses
and why her visceral essay about childbirth and the Duchess of Cambridge hit a
nerve
Catherine Shoard
@catherineshoard
Fri 28 Dec 2018 07.00 GMT Last modified on Fri 28 Dec 2018
11.56 GMT
When Keira Knightley was small there were two things she
knew she would become. First, an actor. That worked out. She got an agent at
six; was in Star Wars at 13 and Pirates of the Caribbean at 17; won an Oscar
nomination for Pride and Prejudice at 20 and another, 10 years later, for The
Imitation Game. Second, a man. That’s still a work in progress.
“I remember everything about that feeling,” she says, now
33, folded up on a sofa in a London hotel. A big blue frock juts out from under
her like a nest. “That girls grew into men, and that’s what I was going to be.”
Toddler logic, she admits; goodness knows what boys became. “Maybe it was that
the girls were the most powerful in the playground. They were in charge and,
obviously, the men were in charge outside. So clearly that’s where I was going.
Only, of course it wasn’t.”
Knightley scrunches her face: a chipmunk photobombing a
supermodel. Still, she was a grade-A tomboy: no skirts, leading a protest at
school until girls were allowed to play football. At 11, she was “obsessed by
The Godfather. I wanted to be Al Pacino and that’s where I was heading. The
great parts are the guys’ parts. You don’t want to be the pretty girl in the
corner or the mum being lovable and supportive. Of course, when you grow up you
are, but you still want to have the adventures.”
Knightley’s entire career, from ball-busting breakthrough in
Bend it Like Beckham to cross-dressing, trans-romancing Colette in her new
film, has been an attempt to have adventures her younger self would respect. To
explore if not what it would be like to be a man, then certainly “the masculine
side of the female, stuck in the dresses and makeup. Almost every character
I’ve played has tried to break out of that image of femininity. That’s why I
like period films, because it’s such an overt cage you put the woman in. That’s
always something I’ve really identified with. I feel like I sit somewhere
else.”
I look quizzical. “I’ve never wanted a penis,” she
clarifies. “Apart from to piss up a tree. Being able to do that standing up: so
convenient. You can just whip it out and whatever. But the idea of something so
vulnerable swinging between my legs, I think I’m all right without.”
Generally, it can be tricky encouraging stars away from
unpacking art to chatting genitals. With Knightley, it’s like turning on a tap.
I don’t think I’ve ever met someone simultaneously so famous and so garrulous
(she’s also bracingly sweary). Or perhaps it’s something only those who have
been A-listers more than half their life already can get away with.
A few days after we meet, Knightley appears on Ellen
DeGeneres’s chatshow to promote The Nutcracker and the Four Realms, and
mentions she has banned her young daughter, Edie (with husband James Righton,
frontman of the new-rave band Klaxons), from watching the Disney classics
Cinderella and A Little Mermaid because of their dodgy feminist messages.
Twitter entered white-heat mode. Thinkpieces were spewed out like ticker tape.
Presumably Disney – which also made The Nutcracker, which has since flopped –
weren’t thrilled. But when asked about it again a fortnight later, instead of
calming the waters, she went in with a whisk: doubling down on her argument
with some PhD-level Disney princess knowledge.
Still, she says in December when we speak again on the
phone, being up for a fight doesn’t mean you want a punch. “I thought I was
just being perky in an interview. My God, people feel really strongly. Don’t
fuck with Cinderella. Her fans will end you.”
Anyway, back to Colette. It’s the latest film from Wash
Westmoreland, who made Still Alice with his husband, Richard Glatzer, before
the latter died of ALS (also known as motor neurone disease) a fortnight after
Julianne Moore’s Oscar win for lead actress. They co-wrote this one, too, and
it’s clearly the work of a couple: intimate, barbed and funny. The plot
revolves around Colette and her literary entrepreneur husband Willy (Dominic
West), who pass off her novels as his, until Colette starts resenting the fiction,
and Willy’s hypocritical jealousy over her affairs with a Louisiana heiress
(Poldark’s Eleanor Tomlinson) and a gender-fluid aristocrat (Denise Gough) who
never removes her suit. By and large, men fare badly. But Willy is, like
Colette, finely drawn, charming for all his ludicrosity. In one scene, he wins
his wife back by explaining that men are the weaker sex, slaves to their
biology, ergo his endless shagging.
“The Weaker Sex” is
also the withering title of an essay Knightley wrote for a collection called
Feminists Don’t Wear Pink And Other Lies, published in October. At the time, it
caused a stink for what some perceived as an attack on the Duchess of Cambridge
for looking glam hours after the birth of her daughter. Was she surprised? “The
whole essay was about the silencing of women’s experience. So it’s interesting
that’s exactly what happened from certain media outlets. They turned a moment
of empathy from one body to another around to say: she’s shaming her.”
Yet women seemed just as mean as men. “Yeah, that’s
interesting. Internalised misogyny? I’m not criticising that. All of us respond
to and survive within the culture in the way that we can. But I think we need
to have a big look at ourselves.”
Indeed. The duchess section is actually the blandest part of
a blazing manifesto that starts with Knightley’s vagina splitting, swiftly
brings in blood, poo, cracked nipples and incontinence pads, then closes with a
broadside against male colleagues:
“They tell me what it
is to be a woman. Be nice, be supportive, be pretty but not too pretty, be thin
but not too thin, be sexy but not too sexy, be successful but not too
successful. … But I don’t want to flirt and mother them, flirt and mother,
flirt and mother. I don’t want to flirt with you because I don’t want to fuck
you, and I don’t want to mother you because I am not your mother. … I just want
to work, mate. Is that OK? Talk and be heard, be talked to and listen. Male
ego. Stop getting in the way.”
The essay, says Knightley, was “just sort of vomited out”,
submitted in a “fuck it” moment, published “because we have to harness this
moment in time and use our voices to keep the conversation going. Because we’re
saddled with a system built on inequality,” she says, “progress is going to be
slow and painful and uncomfortable. But I want to make sure I’m not raising my
daughter in fear of the whole other half of the human race. Just as it’s
important to raise boys seeing the whole of a woman’s experience, not simply
one aspect of femininity. Otherwise, how can you respect it?”
The core problem, she reckons, is that the voices of a
generation of women are lost to childcare. This means – to bring it back to
straying Willy – that “we all empathise with men hugely because, culturally,
their experience is so explored. We know so many aspects of even male
sexuality. But we don’t feel like men can say: ‘Yes, I understand what you’re
talking about because I’ve got this wealth of art and film and theatre and TV
from your point of view.’”
So if women don’t come on flirty or maternal, she thinks,
some men get stumped. “Before motherhood, you’re sexy, but if we talk about the
whole vagina-splitting thing then that’s terrifying; there’s no sex there, so
what we do is go into the virgin-mother retrofit, that’s nice and safe. The
problem with those two images is I think very few women actually identify with
them. Women are meant to play the flirt or the mother in order to get their
voice heard. I can’t. It makes me feel sick.””
On set, she was informed by a male director – not Westmoreland
– exactly what she was: not passive-aggressive, but openly aggressive. Her eyes
pop recalling the shock. “I thought that was extraordinary. I hadn’t raised my
voice, I hadn’t sworn, I simply disagreed with a point. And this was someone I
liked.”
Look back over Knightley’s previous press and what sticks
out – more, even, than her habit of irritating people by dint of crimes
including her looks and niceness – is her composure. She has always seemed
poised, someone of conviction and confidence, if not arrogance. Bumblings have
been low-key; she has kept it together.
Not without effort, it turns out. Earlier this year, she
told the Hollywood Reporter that she had had a breakdown aged 22, following
five years of endless exposure. She didn’t leave the house for three months. A
therapist said she was her first client who wasn’t being paranoid when she
worried about people following her. She needed hypnotherapy to feel able to
walk the Baftas red carpet for Atonement in 2007.
She switched focus: a year off, then smaller, odder films
with more difficult heroines – The Edge of Love, Never Let Me Go, A Dangerous
Method. She upped the robustness of her engagement with the press, suing the
Daily Mail after it implied she was a poster girl for anorexia. Today, she
credits that crisis with being able to handle the first few months of
motherhood. “Your body just created life and now it’s shifting in order to feed
it. That’s monumental and we’re all expected to go: ‘Oh no, all good, I’m
groovy – I haven’t slept, I’m fine. That I’m able to forgive myself for not
being brilliant [as a parent] every fucking day is probably because of that
breakdown.”
And that is another reason why marginalising women once they
have had children is dangerous, she says, if not warming to her theme (she
never really strays from it) then expanding her thesis. It means this sort of
experience is sanitised and so those struggling feel even worse. She read
recently that 50% of new mothers have mental health difficulties. “With
children, it’s one in 10 and that’s called a crisis. So what’s one in two?
That’s a fucking catastrophe.
How, as a society,
are we not supporting single mothers 100%? We should literally be wrapping them
in cotton wool and giving them a cuddle
“We have to talk about it so we know we haven’t failed. It’s
really difficult for me, who has an unbelievably supportive family and the
money to pay for good childcare. How, as a society, are we not supporting
single mothers 100%? We should literally be wrapping them in cotton wool and
giving them a cuddle. Saying absolutely we will help [them] as much as we possibly
can. That we’re not seems insane.”
The other reason Knightley speaks her mind is it would never
occur to her not to. The perception is that she hails from high privilege. But
her schooling was bog-standard; her parents – playwright Sharman Macdonald and
actor Will Knightley – thespy, but also relatively radical leftwing types. Not
quite hippies, says Knightley, but as close as Teddington in south-west London
probably got. She says she hadn’t realised how lucky she was to be raised by a
father who loved the fact his wife often earned more than he did.
In the film she is currently shooting, Misbehaviour, she
plays Sally Alexander, a women’s libber among those who invaded the stage at
Miss World 1970 with football rattles and flour bombs. Watch footage of the
real Alexander today and you could be watching an older Knightley. These are
her people: arty but determined, polite but forthright.
And that, perhaps, is why Knightley’s pronouncements don’t –
for me at least – stick in the throat. So much political rhetoric trotted out
by film stars smacks of the bandwagon: rote homilies, recited without too much
consideration.
Knightley sings from a more sophisticated hymn sheet. Take
Miss World. Plainly, she’s not a fan: “I’d never seen a beauty competition
before but you think, wow this is really out there! The way they turn their
arses and the cameras panning up and down. The way society as a whole goes: ‘Oh
no, this is fine.’”
But while the actions of Alexander et al were “amazingly
brave”, she’s not sure she would have done the same, because the contestants
felt they were being attacked. “That was unfair. And having been on stage, if
something like that happened it would be utterly terrifying.”
She is even measured when I asked about Harvey Weinstein,
giving “credit where credit’s due; he was very good at getting independent
cinema an audience”. They had most contact around the time of The Imitation
Game, when she wasn’t remotely in need of patronage, and pregnant – both
reasons he didn’t try it on, she thinks. “And maybe he just didn’t fancy me,
could be as simple as that.”
She swears ignorance over his alleged assaults. “I
absolutely knew he was a womaniser, because you could see it. But I thought
that was consensual, and I’d never heard he’d raped anybody. Everyone knew he
was a bully because he would scream and shout. But it wasn’t obvious he was
doing what he was doing with the bathrobe and the massage and the pot plant.
The pot plant!”
It is rare that Weinstein is discussed by anyone with clear
eyes and a not totally po-face. Does she worry the debate triggered by the
revelations about his alleged behaviour is misandrist? “Absolutely. There’s a
time [women] should be standing up and howling and making as much noise as
possible, saying: ‘Hey, this system doesn’t work for one half of us.’ But that
it makes it very difficult for men to speak and I think there may be some
things we don’t want to hear.”
Such as? “About their sexuality, how they see us, exactly
what they want. It’s a really tricky discussion but I don’t know how we move
forward without engaging men. And you can’t hate them if you’re trying to do
that.” A pause, another grimace: scepticism made flesh. “Also: they’re nice. I
know some really lovely ones.”
• Colette is released on 12 January.
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