Our next Film Society movie is another based on a true story, that of Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette, an early 20th Century writer more widely known as simply Colette, who became famous for her revolutionary and explicit female-oriented novels and plays.
As a young woman, Colette defied convention, leaving her country village to run off to Paris to marry the older, notorious writer and critic Henry Gauthier-Villars. Henry (known by his pen name Willy) is the head of a publishing house that is essentially a “factory” of writers whose work is published as his own. With a voracious appetite for fame and women, Willy’s expensive habits drain his resources and when his writers go unpaid and stop doing his bidding, he enlists his wife to write for him.
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Telling Colette that “no one reads women writers,” he publishes under his name her account of her school days, “Claudine at School.” When it meets with success, he goes so far as to lock her in her room to produce sequels. Thanks to her brilliant literary prose, three more Claudine novels become best-sellers, and, while a suppressed and frustrated Colette argues for the artistic credit she deserves, Willy revels in the fame and financial success. Willy’s self-promotion and serial infidelities are a vexation to Colette, yet liberate her, as, free of his control, she indulges in her own erotic longings with men and women alike. As their respective affairs become more involved and Colette’s work becomes the toast of Paris, their unconventional relationship is tested and the fight for her creative ownership is on.
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Colette has been called Keira Knightley’s most memorable role. Knightley captures the fascinating, irrepressible and independent spirit of a woman breaking free at a time when that wasn’t easy to do. The movie is an exquisite portrait of Colette’s rebellion against her domineering husband and her rebellion against societal norms to become the artistic genius and literary celebrity that she became. It’s exhilarating, funny, inspiring and thoroughly entertaining. Scenes of physical intimacy are tasteful and few.
Colette has two showings on Saturday January 26 at 5 and 7:30 p.m. at the Salmar Classic. And at 7:30 on Wednesday, January 30, our monthly documentary presentation is Sharkwater Extinction, a Canadian-made movie about the disturbing and illegal shark fin industry.
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