‘Colette’ film review: A liberation story told right

The anarchists and blood-crazed mob are absent from the attractive biographical movie ‘Colette,’ which takes a light, enjoyably fizzy approach to its subject. The world that Colette (a vibrant Keira Knightley) inhabits on-screen is brighter and smaller than in Thurman’s telling, with its luminaries (Proust! Bernhardt!), morphine addicts and sex cruising. The movie’s Colette is never as wild as you might hope for a literary titan and voluptuary who first writes herself into history with her ‘Claudine’ novels while bedding men and women alike. But she’s consistently, gratifyingly, full-bodied company.

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. The whole thing is too smooth, clean and aspirational. And of course he omits much — more books, more lovers, a neglected daughter and the teenage stepson whom Colette seduced — but with a life this exuberantly full, how could he not?