My main criticism of this film is that in my view iconic non English characters rarely work if portrayed by actors of another nationality.
I suspect I may have enjoyed this interesting story based on the real life experiences of .possibly the most famous female French .author Colette more as a French film with French actors.
I just think it may have lost some of the subtlety of language and atmosphere
The actors Keira Knightley as Colette and Dominic West as her husband Wily are good in their roles but imagine for example Beatrice Potter portrayed by Audrey Tattou or Agatha Christie starring Marion Cotillard it would be odd to my mind also and fail to successfully capture their Englishness .
In this movie the dialogue is totally English but when Colette is writing, she writes in French, perhaps I'm too picky , it just seemed a little strange.
The story of a husband taking the fame and literary credit for his wife's brilliant writing talent and the wife's compliance to hold a marriage together was told earlier this year far far more effectively in "The Wife" starring Glenn Close.
This film is about Colette but at times seems dominated and more about Wily the husband they seem to me at times both totally unstable and incompatible especially sexually and emotionally.
Willy, fourteen years older than his wife and one of the most notorious libertines in Paris, introduced Colette into avant-garde intellectual and artistic circles while engaging in sexual affairs and encouraging her own lesbian
It's worth seeing , not great or an award contender as far as I'm concerned but a very interesting story about a fascinating character who wrote the famous Claudine novels and of course her famous 1944 novel Gigi, which inspired the much loved Lerner and Loewe musical of the same name.
Review of Colette
