Wash Westmoreland (2018)

Wash Westmoreland’s account of the young womanhood of Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette (1873-1954) is often bland but the lightweight approach is part of its appeal.  Written by Westmoreland, his late husband Richard Glatzer and Rebecca Lenkiewicz, the film covers a period of eighteen years in Colette’s life, from shortly before until the end of her marriage to the writer and publisher Henri Gauthier-Villars, better known by his pen name, Willy[1].  In 1892, Colette (Keira Knightley) is a teenager, living with her mother (Fiona Shaw) and father (Robert Pugh) in the Burgundy village of Saint-Sauveur.  The sophisticated Parisian Willy (Dominic West), thirteen years Colette’s senior, is a regular visitor to her parents’ home.  The story ends in 1910, the year of Colette’s divorce from Willy and the appearance of La Vagabonde – the first novel published in her own name, following the four Claudine books that purported to be Willy’s.  This is the second film in the space of a few months to centre on a husband’s capitalising on, and concealing, his spouse’s literary efforts and talent for the sake of his own career and success.

The tone, the personnel and the effect of Colette are very different from those of The Wife.  With Keira Knightley as the title character, it’s always going to be hard to believe there are major feminist issues at stake.  Yet the lead’s limitations make this a more nuanced and enlightening story than The Wife – more credible too, and not only because its basis is fact rather than fiction.  The reactions of Knightley’s Colette to Willy’s control and appropriation of her work register more often as petulance than as righteous anger but this serves as a reminder that, at the turn of the twentieth century, a young woman in Colette’s position was unlikely to recognise Willy’s treatment as outrageous.  Colette drew on her own pre-divorce experiences as a pantomime (in the non-British sense) performer to write La Vagabonde, whose heroine Renée Nérée becomes a music-hall dancer after divorcing her cruel, unfaithful husband.  In the onstage moments of Colette, it’s hard to decide if the mediocre artiste we’re watching is an accurate interpretation of Colette the performer or the best that Knightley can do.  And if Westmoreland had taken the story beyond the point when Colette’s awareness and self-confidence had grown considerably, Knightley’s lack of depth might have been a real problem.   As it is, her combination of wilfulness and the ‘jaw thing’ that’s earned her much critical rebuke over the years suggests a potential formidability.  The enthusiastic press notices adorning the film’s trailer include ‘Keira Knightley as you’ve never seen her before’ and this is true enough.  She’s effective in a leading role, for the first time in this viewer’s experience.

Knightley works well with Dominic West, which helps reinforce another large difference between Colette and The Wife.  You get a strong sense of how much Colette and Willy, for all the discord between them, enjoy each other’s company.  West is far better cast and more convincing here than as Jean Valjean in the current BBC serialisation of Les Misérables.  (He tries hard but can’t produce the rough-hewn quality that Hugo’s hero needs.  The half-hearted Northern vowels, which come and go, seem to sum up his unease in the role.)  West was very good on television, though, in The Hour (2011-12) as a plausible, charismatic news presenter – adjectives that also apply to the man he plays in Colette.  The assured, egocentric Willy is cock of the walk in the literary salons of fin-de-siècle Paris.  West captures this well but is equally good (and amusing) in showing Willy’s edgy vulnerability.  His glancing looks and incidental remarks signify an actor securely inside his character.

Who wears the trousers in matters of sex is an interesting element of the story – and the moral permissiveness of the social circles in which Colette and Willy move a distinctive context for a parable of patriarchal exploitation.  Willy lets his wife explore her lesbian side but when Colette starts an affair with the rich young American Georgie Raoul-Duval (Eleanor Tomlinson), he gets competitive and has his own secret liaison with her.  (Eleanor Tomlinson’s Louisiana accent is approximate but she gives Georgie a glowing allure.)   Colette develops a more enduring attachment to Mathilde de Morny, Marquise de Belbeuf – aka Missy (Denise Gough), who habitually wears men’s clothes.  Missy’s example leads her protégée at one point to … well, follow suit, as Colette turns up in Willy’s office dressed in jacket, waistcoat and trousers.  The casting of Denise Gough as Missy reflects the film’s desire to be easy on the eye as well as politically right on.  Wash Westmoreland earns brownie points by casting transgender actors (Jake Graf, Rebecca Root) in minor roles but plays safe with this more significant one.  If online photographs are any guide, the gender-bending Missy had a decidedly masculine appearance.  Westmoreland seems to have figured that historical accuracy might unhelpfully de-beautify the scenes between Missy and Colette, both their stage appearances together and in the bedroom.

Without the easy authority Dominic West brings to them, the Paris salon sequences would be distinctly underwhelming.  Keira Knightley lacks vocal colour but her line readings are livelier than those of most of Colette’s fellow bohemians.  As the playwright Gaston Arman de Caillavet, Jake Graf isn’t good; Dickie Beau, as the pantomime Georges Wague, is worse.  Arabella Weir, though not a favourite of mine, at least gives de Caillavet’s salonnière mother a bit of theatrical pep.  The direction of these scenes is listless but Wash Westmoreland does better in a couple of montages: first, Colette’s and Willy’s visits to Georgie’s boudoir; then a summary of the prodigious commercial success of the Claudine books and their various spinoffs and influences. The Georgie montage, scored to Delibes’s Coppelia waltz, is the highlight of Westmoreland’s use of popular items from the French late-nineteenth-century classical repertoire.   These blend pleasingly with Thomas Adès’s original music, itself a nice expression of the spirit of this agreeable but (as I’ve now discovered) quickly forgettable film.

15 January 2019

[1] Since the protagonist too is best known by her pen name, I’ll use that throughout this note – even though she’s more often referred to in Colette as Gabrielle.