5. Colette | 2018 | Wash Westmoreland | 8.5
I don’t think there is an actor or actress who excels more in period pieces than Keira Knightley. Pride and Prejudice, Atonement, The Duchess, Anna Karenina, The Imitation Game, the list goes on and on and now Colette can be added to that as well. It is a very mature performance, compared to a lot of her earlier work. The respect for Colette as a person is felt through Knightley’s performance and Westmoreland’s directing. I loved how Colette’s queerness is (during the end of the 19th century) casually addressed and not the main ‘issue’ of the film. The film is about Colette finding her own voice and own identity without focusing solely on her sexuality. Westmoreland managed to make a feminist film without constantly having to refer to that fact. Obviously her queerness and gender are topics of discussion during the film, but they are not the main issue or subject. Dominic West, who plays Colette’s husband Willy, gives a performance in which he tries to make a thoroughly unlikeable character likable. For me, he got a little bit too much screentime, but I understand why that choice was made. There was one thing though I did wonder about. The Danish Girl is about the first known transgender person in the world and that film takes place more than twenty years later than Colette. It is interesting that Colette refers to Missy multiple times as he. Gender was for Colette a lot more fluid. I do not know enough about Colette as a person, but either the film exaggerates her open-mindedness or Colette was truly a woman who was lightyears ahead of her time. Considering her work, the latter might not be too hard to believe.
