Colette

Long before influencers were hawking detox teas on Instagram, there was the "Claudine" craze—a turn-of-the-century marketing blitz that put a fictional schoolgirl's face on everything from soap to cigarettes. It was a brand built on the wit and "naughty" nostalgia of a rural girl transplanted to Paris, but the name on the cover wasn't the person holding the pen.

I watched Colette while trying to eat a lavender-flavored macaron that tasted suspiciously like expensive soap, which felt appropriately Parisian and slightly pretentious for a Tuesday night. It’s a film that fits perfectly into our current cultural moment, where we are obsessively re-examining whose voices were silenced to build the "great men" of history. This isn't a dusty, polite period piece; it’s a sharp, modern-feeling reclamation project that asks what happens when a ghostwriter decides to haunt the house they built.

The Original Content Creator

The story kicks off with Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette, played with a fantastic, simmering intelligence by Keira Knightley. She’s whisked away from the French countryside to the chaotic, ego-driven salons of Paris by Henry Gauthier-Villars, better known as "Willy." Dominic West plays Willy as a nineteenth-century version of a guy who thinks having a podcast is a personality. He’s a literary entrepreneur who employs a "factory" of writers to churn out reviews and novels under his name because he’s too busy being a "man about town" to actually write.

When the money runs low, Willy enlists Colette to write her schoolgirl memories. The result is Claudine à l'école, a sensation that turns Willy into a superstar and Colette into a prisoner of her own success. The dynamic between them is fascinatingly toxic. Dominic West, who most of us remember as McNulty from The Wire, is dangerously charming here. You see why she stays, and you see exactly how he manipulates her talent while convincing her she’d be nothing without his marketing genius. It’s a gaslighting masterclass that feels uncomfortably relevant to anyone who has ever seen a woman’s creative labor credited to a man in a suit.

Breaking the Corset

What makes Colette stand out in the sea of Contemporary Cinema biopics is how it handles her burgeoning identity. Director Wash Westmoreland (who previously co-directed the devastating Still Alice) doesn't treat Colette’s queer awakening as a "scandalous" subplot. Instead, it’s the core of her liberation. When she meets "Missy," the Marquise de Belbeuf (played with wonderful gravity by Denise Gough), the film shifts from a story about a bad marriage to a story about a woman realizing she can invent herself from scratch.

Keira Knightley has spent much of her career in corsets (think Pride & Prejudice or Atonement), but here, she uses that familiarity to her advantage. You can see her physically shedding the restrictions of the Belle Époque. By the time she’s bobbing her hair and performing in pantomime at the Moulin Rouge, she’s unrecognizable from the girl in the country. It’s a transformative performance that feels like Knightley finally saying, "I’m done being the ingenue, thanks."

The film also benefits from a script with real emotional stakes. Wash Westmoreland wrote this with his late husband and creative partner, Richard Glatzer, while Glatzer was battling ALS. Knowing that they spent years trying to get this story told—a story about a woman finding her voice while one half of the creative duo was literally losing his—adds a layer of poignancy that hits harder than your average historical drama.

Style with a Spine

Visually, the movie is a feast, but it’s not just "eye candy." The production design highlights the claustrophobia of the Parisian apartments where Willy literally locks Colette in a room to write. It contrasts beautifully with the open, sun-drenched freedom of her childhood home, where Fiona Shaw (the legendary Aunt Petunia from Harry Potter) delivers a brief but grounding performance as Colette's mother, Sido.

The movie manages to avoid the "Greatest Hits" trap of biopics by focusing on a specific, transformative decade. It understands that Colette’s real legacy wasn't just the books, but the fact that she survived the machine of celebrity. It’s a film about the "brand" vs. the "human." In an era where we’re constantly told to "curate our lives," watching Colette burn down her curated image to find the real person underneath is incredibly satisfying.

Colette is a rare historical drama that feels like it’s breathing the same air we are. It manages to be both a lush escape into 1900s Paris and a biting critique of creative theft. If you’ve ever felt like you were doing all the work while someone else took the credit, this is going to be your new favorite revenge movie. It’s smart, sexy, and reminds us that while history is written by the winners, the truth is usually hidden in the ghostwriter’s desk.