Colette review: a deliciously vampish Keira Knightley helps a queer icon find her voice

Dir: Wash Westmoreland. Starring: Keira Knightley, Dominic West, Eleanor Tomlinson, Fiona Shaw, Aiysha Hart, Denise Gough. 15 cert, 112 mins

The Claudine novels, then-racy accounts of a young provincial girl blossoming in the big city, were the toast of Paris in 1900, widely read by women of the day who took her liberation vicariously to heart. Colette, the intricately woven, Keira-Knightley-starring biopic of their author, brings her achievements to light by first showing them trampled upon for years.

Although widely considered autobiographical now, the books were attributed not to Colette herself but to her first husband, the roguish literary entrepreneur Henry Gauthier-Villars, better-known as “Willy”. At his worst, as illustrated with caddish gusto by Dominic West, Willy would lock Colette in an upstairs room and force her to write while he pursued affairs all over town.

She was a prisoner of his sweatshop approach to literary production, one of many ghostwriters he exploited to prop up the Willy brand. “You’re one of his ghosts already”, somebody points out, soon after he’s swept this restless country girl away from hay-bale frolics and into the artistic ferment of the Belle époque.

For all its meticulous embroidery around a very singular life, Colette speaks to our moment quite tartly too, not just for the novelist’s fight to throw off these patriarchal shackles but her means of doing so – forms of expression that included acting and dance, and the lesbian affairs she flaunted to establish her independence, overlapping in one case with a woman Willy, too, was romancing.

It all marks another maturing step for Knightley as a leading lady, deepening those flirtations with tomboy style that marked her career early on – think back to the mistaken-for-gay plotting of Bend it Like Beckham, say. Here, in a variety of gender-bending costumes, she is styled as an ahead-of-her-time queer icon with a complex attitude to her own femininity, and gets to voice all this thoughtfully opposite the likes of Missy (Denise Gough), one lover whose choice of both male and female pronouns would make her gender-fluid or even trans in today’s terms.

After directing Julianne Moore to her Oscar for the astute weepie Still Alice, Wash Westmoreland, minus his late husband and writing partner Richard Glatzer, has been given the chance to realise this long-harboured project, and does elegant justice to the story right through. It’s an admittedly muted piece, with an episodic quality that takes something of its cue from the Bildungsroman plotting of the four Claudine books themselves.

But there’s lift and lightness to its best scenes, amid spirited homages to the era’s art, both in Colette’s deliciously vampish treading of the boards, and in some Sunday strolls through Parisian parks as only Seurat imagined them.

Thomas Adès, trying his hand for the first time at film scoring, has written salon-specific pieces that prance and cascade but then capture a certain post-Impressionist repose, leaning to the brink of modernism. Plus, injecting needed swagger, there’s West, giving us a full-bodied, pleasingly shaded account of a husband that lesser scripts would have turned into a monster. For all its promised rebellion, Colette’s story really segues into a more nuanced tale of outgrowing: not just a childish and bullying spouse, but an age of acquiescence.