Movie review: 'Colette' inspires, but fails to fully capture complexity of French author

“Colette” - ★ ★ ½

Wash Westmoreland's “Colette” is a very British movie about a very French feminist icon. A handsome and lively period film, it's too timid to capture the ravenous appetites of the literary force that was Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette. But with Keira Knightley playing the trailblazing author, “Colette” has nimbly condensed an un-condensable life into a sprightly and relevant biopic.

“My name is Claudine, I live in Montigny; I was born there in 1884; I shall probably not die there.”

Those were the first lines in “Claudine à l'école,” the 1900 coming-of-age novel that made the Burgundy-born Colette's fictional alter ego, Claudine, a sensation. It was, however, published under the nom de plume of her husband (“Willy”), the rakish publisher Henry Gauthier-Villars (played by Dominic West).

It would be years before Colette was writing under her own name, though once she did, she quickly established herself as, among many other things, one of France's greatest authors. She was nominated for a Nobel Prize in literature in 1948 and given a state funeral after her death, at the Palais-Royal, in 1954. Along the way, she blazed a relentlessly unconventional path through Belle Epoque Paris, leaving behind a litany of affairs (with men and women), scandals (an on-stage kiss with a woman at the Moulin Rouge sparked a riot) and dozens of books, including 1944's “Gigi,” written while her third husband was interned by the Nazis.

Westmoreland (“Still Alice”), along with co-writers Richard Glatzer (Westmoreland's late husband) and Rebecca Lenkiewicz, have judiciously opted to concentrate on Colette's early period married to Gauthier-Villars, when she wrote the first Claudine books. On the one hand, this focus gives “Colette” a timely dramatic arc of female empowerment: This is when she finds her voice and eventually takes control of it.

On the other, it frames her life too much around Gauthier-Villars. And in West's hands, he's a gloriously bombastic character, forever ducking creditors, carousing with women and prodding ghost writers to keep his literary factor churning. At a low ebb, he encourages Colette to write.

Their scenes together sparkle with quick-witted dialogue. But as success comes their way, their relationship see-saws between affection and servitude. In one scene, Willy locks her in a room to write.

Knightley gives Colette a modern, uncompromising posture as she breezily flaunts the era's gendered orthodoxy. Still, there is little that suggests the fire of a writer who published nearly 80 volumes in her career or the tenacity of someone who reported from the front lines of World War I. Nor is there the complexity and contradictions of a woman who so brazenly ignored - and was punished for ignoring - the time's female stereotypes.

“Colette” may be missing some of the rebellious grit that its renegade hero deserves. But the film succeeds as an inspirational period tale about a woman seizing her independence. Hidden by a nom de plume and kept under lock and key, Colette bursts free.

<b>Starring:</b> Keira Knightley, Dominic West

<b>Directed by:</b> Wash Westmoreland

<b>Other:</b> A Bleecker Street release. In limited release. Rated R for sexuality and nudity. 121 minutes