Film Night – Colette
Film Night – Colette2019
Drama, 109 mins
Cert 15 (sexual scenes, nudity)
Director:
Wash Westmoreland
Cast includes:
Keira Knightley, Eleanor Tomlinson, Dominic West
Bookings: email filmnight@rockbournevillagehall.org.uk or
phone Lucy Matthews 01725 518695
This month’s film night – COLETTE – is a period drama in which a young woman successfully fights for recognition after her first books are published, unwillingly, under her husband’s name, becoming a literary rebel who scandalised turn-of-the-century Paris with her sex life.
Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette (1873 -1954,) was a self- proclaimed country girl who wrote scandalous and closely observed novels about a stratum of French society. She married three times and had several children, but it is her devotion to several notable women which, together with her relationship with her second husband’s 16-year old son, caused her notoriety in the Paris of the fin-de-siècle epoch. This beautiful and sensitively made film by British couple Wash Westmoreland and his late husband Richard Glatzer stars Keira Knightley at her best. Witty, deeply intelligent and sensitive, we share her fury at her first husband, strongly played by the always terrific Dominic West, who effectively steals her identity and bullies her to have her early books authored by himself but under a sort of trade mark ‘Willy’.
Colette’s literary fame extended to novels, short stories, memoirs and essays, and, as a journalist, she reported on everything from domestic violence to the front lines of the first World War, from anorexia to literature. She devised silent film scenarios, wrote a libretto for a Ravel opera, and scripted pantomimes – in which she acted. She was a successful mime and dancer and was for a while the literary editor of the newspaper Le Matin.
After Proust’s death many called Colette the most talented writer in France. She was nominated for the 1948 Nobel Prize in literature and was the first French female writer to be given a state funeral. No film could begin to do justice to the range of her genius, but our film wisely does not try, focusing instead on her eventful enough late teens and early 20s.
Engrossing, challenging, adult entertainment of the highest level, don’t miss Colette.
John Crome
Click here to read about Colette on IMDb
Click here to download the flyer in pdf format
Doors open 7:00pm, Film 7:30pm £6, Supper 9:30pm £6, wine £12/bottle
Pay at the door, last bookings 1200 Sunday 12th January
Next RVH Events:
WED 22 JAN at 7:00pm in the Village Hall: ROCKBOURNE VILLAGE HALL AGM;
WED 19 FEB: FILM NIGHT, film tbd.