Review: Colette

"Gabrielle, wake up" is the first line of Colette and, indeed, the film is about the awakening of one Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette, the country girl who would become celebrated as France's foremost female writer. Exquisite and exhilarating, Colette is also a fantastic showcase for Keira Knightley, whose vibrant and perfectly calibrated performance in the title role surely ranks as one of the best, if not the best, of her career.

The year is 1892, the place is Saint-Saveur. Colette, known as "the girl with the hair" due to the braids that frame either side of her head, is without a dowry, a fact which worries her parents, who believe this might threaten her impending union with Henry Gauthier-Villars (Dominic West), the worldly literary entrepreneur known simply as "Willy." They needn't have been concerned for Willy soon marries Colette and whisks her off to Paris, where everyone knows his name and is astonished that the city's most brilliant rake and ladies man has been caught in the marital web. Not that being a husband curbs Willy's predilection for consorting with disreputable women. Colette, already disenchanted with the pretentiousness of her new world, confesses to her mother Sido (Fiona Shaw) that nothing is how she imagined it but she has to get used to marriage. "Better to make marriage get used to you," Sido advises and Colette takes her words to heart, letting Willy know that her eyes are open to his nature but that he must promise never to lie to her.

Whilst all seems mended on the marital front, Willy is constantly on the brink of poverty. Overseeing a factory of ghostwriters whose works he publishes under his name, he certainly has the supply for the publishers that demand it but would rather gamble the money away than save it. Finding himself in even more dire financial straits than usual, he reconsiders publishing a novel that Colette had written, a novel he had earlier rejected for having no plot and being "too feminine." The novel, Claudine at School, based on her own experiences growing up and published under his name, is a sensation. Soon, teenage girls everywhere are copying the Claudine look (short hair, prim black dress) and purchasing all manner of merchandise bearing Claudine's name. Claudine is the goose that lays the golden eggs, and Willy is determined to keep it going even if it means locking Colette in a room until she produces more pages and denying her true right of authorship.

Adding to the complexity of the couple's relationship is the fact that both pursued other relationships. Colette engaged in same-sex relationships with Georgie Raoul-Duval (Eleanor Tomlinson), a wayward debutante from Louisiana married to a munitions magnate three times her age, and, more shockingly, Mathilde de Morny (Denise Gough), a cross-dressing French noblewoman (their onstage kiss during a show at the Moulin Rouge caused a near riot). What's remarkable about Colette is its straightforward presentation. Too often, there's a tendency to herald - in other words, to emphasise how groundbreaking and revolutionary someone or something was. Director Wash Westmoreland instead simply lets Colette, the people significant to her, and her milieu speak for themselves.

Colette, especially, is shown as a woman of immense curiosity and intellect, someone who remained very much herself and who, to paraphrase Sido, let Paris and life adjust to her. Knightley is superb in the role - luminous, intelligent, vulnerable - and she is well-matched by West, who makes Willy more than a mere villain and cad. Their final moment, when Colette well and truly lays into Willy, is tremendous with West piercingly conveying Willy's shame, hurt and defeat as Knightley's Colette stares him down, eyes full of fury and power never leaving his face, finally reclaiming her name for her own.

Colette

Directed by: Wash Westmoreland

Written by: Richard Glatzer, Rebecca Lenkiewicz, Wash Westmoreland

Starring: Keira Knightley, Dominic West, Eleanor Tomlinson, Fiona Shaw, Denise Gough, Aiysha Hart, Rebecca Root, Julian Wadham