Colette review: Keira Knightley excels in slightly undercharged biopic of French author

Dir: Wash Westmoreland. Starring: Keira Knightley, Eleanor Tomlinson, Dominic West, Fiona Shaw, Aiysha Hart, Denise Gough. Cert 15, 112 mins

Fin de siecle Paris is recreated in extraordinarily vivid fashion in Wash Westmoreland’s Colette. For all the brilliance of its production design, though, and in spite of two very lively central performances, the film can’t overcome the challenge faced by every literary biopic: namely, how to dramatise a life of which large parts are spent sitting at a desk writing.

Keira Knightley plays aspiring author Colette as a passionate and fiercely independent figure. She is looking to establish an artistic identity of her own at a time when conventional, patriarchal wisdom has it “lady writers don’t sell”. First seen as a 19-year-old in 1892, looking like Anne of Green Gables, with her hair in braids, she is a young woman without a dowry or any obvious prospects. She has grown up close to nature in Saint-Sauveur in rural France.

The filmmakers portray the countryside in a style that can’t help but bring to mind impressionist painting from the period. The sun always appears to be shining through the leaves. Everything, from the rolling fields to the lush gardens, from the sleepy railways stations to the stately country houses, looks picturesque. The men in top hats and women with parasols could have stepped out of Monet pictures.

Colette may seem demure but that doesn’t stop her from having sex in the barn with the much older Henry Gauthier-Villars (known as “Willy”), a city slicker who served in the army with her father. Willy (Dominic West), who eventually becomes her husband, lures her away from home to live in a Paris “heaving with artists and poets”. He is a dandy, a preening bon viveur, proud of his moustache and beard and in love with his own voice. He writes stories and music reviews and likes to flirt with his hostesses in the smartest salons.

We are in a world familiar to Moulin Rouge and Bel Ami. It is no surprise when characters perform a can-can or when Willy makes lewd remarks about the Eiffel Tower as “a giant erection in the heart of Paris”.

In the course of the movie, Knightley goes through multiple changes of costume. The ingenuous country girl from the early scenes very quickly becomes more chic and sophisticated. Her haircuts and hats signal her transformation. The filmmakers use mirrors and candlelight to add to her glamour and sense of mystery.

Plot-wise, the film is similar to recent literary drama The Wife, in which Glenn Close played the woman who wrote her Nobel prize-winning husband’s novels. Willy here is a “literary entrepreneur”. He has no qualms about putting his name on Colette’s semi-autobiographical stories and basking in what should be her glory.

West plays him as a flamboyant and likeable figure with an eye on the main chance and a flair for marketing. “Louche sells. More spice, less literature,” he tells Colette as he locks her away to write. They’re an attractive couple with a shared sense of mischief. We are aware from the outset that Colette is cleverer and more talented than her husband, who blithely fritters away the money they earn on gambling, race horses and women. It is also clear that he is the one who (whatever his motives) kick-started her literary career.

The storytelling is episodic. The filmmakers use waltz music and montage sequences as we gallop through the 1890s and early 1900s. Every so often, a title will flash up on screen, stating “Bois De Boulogne 1900” or “Montmartre, Paris 1904”, or Willy will make some remark about “the new craze for moving pictures” to indicate leaps forward in time. Midway through, the film turns briefly into a bedroom farce as both Colette and Willy become enraptured by Georgie Raoul Duval (Eleanor Tomlinson), a bisexual “wayward debutante from Louisiana”.

Colette shows no self-pity. She is far too strong a character to fall prey to romantic despair or to allow her spendthrift and philandering husband to upset her. Her ability to cope means that the film is often short on tension. Whatever the situation, she makes the best of it. If a lover cheats on her or a publisher lets her down, she takes it in her stride.

We also always have the sense that she is looking in at events in her own life as inspiration for her stories. None of her relationships, whether with Willy himself or, later, with the androgynous aristocrat, Mathilde “Missy” de Morny (Denise Gough), are especially turbulent.

As a portrait of an artist as a young woman, the film is intriguing. Knightley shows us Colette evolving, finding her identity as a writer and becoming ever more worldly wise. The men around her continually try to pigeonhole her but she always manages to out-manoeuvre them. Becoming a music hall artist and dancer is one more way of showing her self-reliance.

The film deals with a relatively small part of its subject’s story, long before she wrote Gigi. This is the author in her formative years. Knightley excels in the title role but, as drama, this biopic still feels a little undercharged.

Colette is released in UK cinemas on 11 January