Tuesday, July 01, 2025

Movies I've Missed Until Now: Colette (2018)


It’ll come as no surprise to any of you that I haven’t read anything by the famous French author Colette, and I knew very little about her life. But I enjoy period dramas and I like Keira Knightley okay, so we watched COLETTE, a biopic with Knightley playing the title role. I was a little surprised by it, too, and wound up enjoying it more than I expected for one reason: it’s about ghostwriting.


You see, I had no idea that Colette’s first novels were actually ghost jobs published under her husband’s name, or rather, his pen-name Willy. As the character (played by Dominic West) says several times during the film, Willy is a brand, and it doesn’t matter who actually writes the books as long as they get written. That line really resonates with me, of course, as do the bits about trying to wrestle money that’s due out of publishers and obsessing over the number of pages and the time spent writing. I’m here to tell you, all that stuff really rings true in this movie. I’ve been in those positions many times.

Over and above that, COLETTE is a well-made, well-acted movie that’s long and leisurely but never seemed to drag much. I have no idea how historically accurate it is. I was curious enough after watching it to look up the real Colette and was surprised to find that she didn’t die until 1954, which means I was alive at the same time as her. Things like that always interest me, like knowing that when my parents were born, both Wyatt Earp and Bat Masterson were still alive. In some ways, history is more recent than we think.

3 comments:

Jeff Meyerson said...

I had no idea this movie existed. I did read a couple of her books 50 years ago.

Patrick Murtha said...

I just read the first in Colette’s five-volume Claudine series, Claudine at School, and thought it was great. The voice of the teenage Claudine is quite remarkable, like a turn-of-the-century female Holden Caulfield. And talk about politically incorrect, this school where the girl students and the men and women teachers are all getting it on with each other is…something else. Readers today will appreciate that there is not the remotest hint of self-consciousness or apology for the lesbian content. Colette’s attitude is, let it rip.

James Reasoner said...

Well, dang, I may have to read that now.