BEFORE: It's annual check-up time here at the Movie Year, I mean like I'm going to the doctor today. It's only been 11 months since my last check-up, but I've been on daily antacids for a year and I still get nauseous in the mornings, so they're working, just not well enough. I've tried sleeping sitting up whenever possible (falling asleep right after a movie helps, because I'm usually watching my movie from the recliner). But, I've noticed that I get these dry heaves more often on the days I have to work at the animation studio, which could mean that's it's not a physical problem, it's anxiety from thinking about what I have to do later that day. I don't have this problem on the days where I go work at the movie theater, because that job is less stressful, almost fun in some ways. The problem is that the theater's been mostly closed this winter while the college was on break, so I haven't been earning money there, I'm dependent on both jobs so I can't quit the one that might be making me feel sick in the mornings. Also, too many days spent at home makes me feel like I'm not making any progress, so I've been hit with the double whammy of anxiety and depression, just on alternating days.
The good news is that my blood pressure is down, so's my weight, but I ticked off too many boxes on the questionnaire about depression - I'm toggling between not being hungry and overeating, for example. So after my physical and a referral to a gastro-enterologist, I've got to start thinking of a mental health solution, or a career change, or both.
Keira Knightley carries over from "Last Night", which I watched last night.
THE PLOT: Colette is pushed by her husband to write novels under his name. Upon their success, she fights to make her talents known, challenging gender norms.
AFTER: What do you know, frustration over working hard and not getting anywhere is sort of a central theme of today's movie. Sidonie-Gabriello Colette was a real person, who had the bad fortune of living during the late 18th and early 19th century, when women were apparently not taken seriously as authors, and obviously the patriarchal system was against her success. She married Henry Gauthier-Villars, who wrote under the pen name "Willy" and according to this, was a real hustler, having other people write stories so he could take the credit.
Don't hate the player, hate the game - OK, maybe in this case, hate the player, too. Colette catches him cheating with Parisian whores, and his excuse is that "all men do it". Lame. Then he says, "Oh, it meant nothing..." - well, then, why do it? We all know WHY he did it, but he's got one excuse after another, he'll try anything to have it both ways, kind of like having someone else write a book so he can put his name on it. He not only encourages his wife to write erotic fiction, he locked her in a room until she got something down on paper - classy guy. The first four books Colette wrote about Claudine, the young school girl who goes on a series of sexual escapades, were published with Willy as the author. For whatever reason, Colette went along with this, as she was made to think that nobody would buy the books if they were written by an unknown female author.
According to this film, anyway, Colette was more upset about her husband's lying about his affairs than him actually having them, which seems quite forward-thinking for a woman in the late 1800's. Then she supposedly agreed to some kind of open marriage, I guess because it was more honest than the alternative, and then began (or was encouraged to begin) romantic relationships with women. Maybe it started out as research for the novels, and then she found that she liked it, it's not for me to say. The problem with most biopics is that some poor screenwriter often has to read between the lines and write some dialogue based on assumptions of what everyone's motivations were. Facts are facts, but they don't always tell us WHY people did things the way they did.
Anyway, the film suggests that at one point Colette and her husband were both having affairs with the same woman, a debutante from Louisiana. Colette got with her first, and then perhaps out of jealousy, Willy had sex with her too - based on the length of this montage, that was one busy debutante. I wonder if she got her kicks out of knowing that she was sleeping with both halves of a married couple. Whatever puts a pep in your step, I guess. This seems to have inspired a whole "Claudine" book of its own, but when Colette finds out that her husband was ALSO sleeping with the same woman she was, naturally she's upset. Again, for her it wasn't about the infidelity, but the fact that he wasn't truthful about it.
After further success with the books, a stage adaptation of "Claudine" becomes a hit, and then Colette not only takes up pantomime acting herself, but gets into a long-term relationship with a woman who dressed and acted as a man. The timeline of the film is a little different, in real life Colette didn't take to the stage until after she divorced her husband - but here the couple still works together for a while, despite the fact they both have relationships with women. Colette falls in love with Missy, and their kiss on stage at the Moulin Rouge draws cries of outrage and scandal from the audience. I guess the French weren't as progressive back then as they became later?
Eventually, Willy screws over Colette one too many times, by selling off the rights to all the Colette novels, without telling his wife. Well, it's not like she wrote them - oh, wait, she did. This is the last straw for her, and she runs off to make more horrible stage pantomime shows, and he tries to burn the early manuscripts that were written by Colette's hand. Thankfully, there's only ONE shot here of Willy trying in vain to type up a new Claudine story and failing because he's got writer's block - I'm honestly surprised there weren't ten more scenes just like that.
Colette has the last laugh here, because she ends up writing a new novel, "La Vagabonde", about her years working on stage plays in music halls, and it became a big hit. And then in the 1920's she wrote more original novels AND was recognized as the true author of the "Claudine" books, she even married a couple more men, Henry de Jouvenel and Maurice Goudeket. (The marriage to de Jouvenel didn't work out because they were both unfaithful, she apparently had an affair with her stepson...)
In the decades that followed, she came to be known as France's greatest female writer, and her novel "Gigi" got turned into a play and a movie. She also was known as a journalist and photographer, then of course World War II came along and changed everything. She had a few articles appear in Pro-Nazi publications during the German occupation, and that will really just kill anybody's career. But the movie "Colette" only takes us up to the music hall days and the publication of "La Vagabond", and I think we all know why it stopped there.
But the relationship stuff here, with the lesbian affairs, the open marriage, the transgender actors, is really ahead of its time - and so naturally I wonder if it all really went down that way, or if that's a modern interpretation of the way things might have been. So today's "Love Tip" is: Never work with your wife, or marry a co-worker, because these marriages rarely work out in the long term. For example, Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman - we all thought at one point they'd be together forever, right?
Also starring Dominic West (last seen in "Genius"), Eleanor Tomlinson (last seen in "Einstein and Eddington"), Aiysha Hart (last seen in "Hope Gap"), Fiona Shaw (last seen in "Lizzie"), Denise Gough (last seen in "The Kid Who Would Be King"), Robert Pugh (last seen in "Into the Storm"), Rebecca Root (last seen in "Last Christmas"), Jake Graf (last seen in "The Danish Girl"), Julian Wadham (last seen in "Victoria & Abdul"), Polina Litvak, Caroline Boulton, Sloan Thompson, Arabella Weir, Máté Haumann, Ray Panthaki (last seen in "Official Secrets"), Al Weaver (last seen in "Doom"), Virág Bárány, Dickie Beau (last seen in "Bohemian Rhapsody"), Janine Harouni (last seen in "The Batman"), Johnny K. Palmer, Shannon Tarbet, Dorcas Coppin.
RATING: 6 out of 10 pieces of repossessed furniture
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