Kritiken

Colette’s life and the transformations that occurred during this vital period of her personal and professional journey are cannily reframed through a dual emphasis on emotional and financial self-sufficiency and her awakening to same-sex attraction. Yet with its flocked wallpaper, frilly frocks and bejewelled turtles, much of the film is inescapably about its surfaces as much as its depths.

The movie's treatment of Colette’s same-sex affairs may be as tasteful as the set design, but the film is an absorbing introduction to a trailblazing artist.

Impotence notwithstanding, it remains the case that, for a film that clearly wants to honor Colette as a sapphic icon, there is far too much Willy.

Mr. Westmoreland doesn’t make more of the master-slave dynamic that feeds Colette’s twinned sexual and literary development, perhaps because he wanted to make a liberation story. He has succeeded, at times movingly, even if Colette’s deliverance can seem shaped to 21st-century expectations and norms rather than to fin de siècle complexities and contradictions.

It tonally and visually manages to balance the feverish luxury of belle époque Paris with a sophisticated gravity and absurdly frenzied emotions with beautifully subdued sensuality. Yet despite being an undeniably well-crafted film, Colette nevertheless fails its subject.

The sex scenes are bloodless, all ringlets and collarbones, which is especially disappointing from director Wash Westmoreland, who got his start [directing] gay porn.