MAKSQUIBS CINEMATHEQUE: COLETTTE (2018)

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Tuesday, March 15, 2022

COLETTTE (2018)

Maddeningly tasteful and dramatically timid, this bio-pic of French author Colette must have been looking to fill a schedule slot on Masterpiece Theater; that’s Masterpiece Theater circa 1983. With a bi-focal approach, director/co-scripter Wash Westmoreland covers Colette’s youthful marriage to established literary entrepreneur/writer Henry Gauthier-Villars, over-committed/debt-ridden/society darling, who published her popular semi-autobiographical stories under his own name. But if he’s stolen her work (at first with her blessing), her heart has been stolen by an artistically ambitious cross-dressing lesbian lover. Let les scandales begin! Alas, they never do. Even a small riot in a theater after a same-sex kiss looks pretty harmless and the film never comes to life, rough edges smoothed over and details, details, details all wrong. Even the clever use of music from the period, by composers Colette & ‘Willy’ likely dined with, doesn’t help. What’s Saints-Saëns ‘Carnival of the Animals,’, a score he famously hid during his lifetime, doing in here? With cool, foggy color when we need a full 1950s palette of TechniColor’d Sirk or Minnelli*, and the wound up emotions to go with it. The filmmakers all so worried about putting a foot wrong, they never put one right.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT/LINK: *See what this should have looked like in the eccentric, animated wonder of DILILI IN PARIS/’18. https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2022/02/dilili-paris-dilili-in-paris-2018.html

SCREWY THOUGHT OF HE DAY: The specific French tone missing from COLETTE’s all-British cast even manages to top the wrongheaded lineup of eccentric Brits hired to play all the French supporting roles in the Gare Montparnasse sequences of Martin Scorsese’s HUGO/’11.

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Tuesday, March 15, 2022

COLETTTE (2018)

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