Keira Knightley Starts a Literary and Sexual Revolution in First Trailer For COLETTE
The first trailer for Keira Knightley's new film Colette has been released and it tells the true story of a young novelist who is taken advantage of by her husband. As she writes the wildly popular Claudine novels, her husband Henry Gauthier-Villars, played by Dominic West, slaps his name on it and takes credit for her work. So she has to fight back, and in the process things get a little wild. This really is a fascinating story.
I had a chance to see the film at Sundance earlier this year and it was a great film and told the fascinating story of a woman that I had never heard of before. For those of you who are fans of Knightley, you'll be happy to hear that this is one of the best performances that she's given. Here's the synopsis for the film:
Colette is arguably one of France’s most important and groundbreaking twentieth-century writers, and her dozens of volumes of provocative fiction, memoirs, journalism, and drama jubilantly bucked the societal constraints that were placed on women. Writer/director Wash Westmoreland’s mesmerizing film tells the story of this iridescent artist’s creative awakening in turn-of-the-century Paris—a place as dynamic and modern as she was.
Colette (played with sumptuous feistiness by Keira Knightley) arrives from the countryside as a young bride to Willy—an older, notorious literary entrepreneur—and she is immediately swept into flamboyant, libertine society. At Willy’s prompt, she takes pen to paper and invents the loosely autobiographical Claudine novels, which take Paris by storm. The character Claudine becomes a veritable pop-culture icon, but Colette does not, since Willy takes authorial credit. To reclaim her literary voice, Colette must set out for new transgressive adventures, sans Willy.
To bring Colette’s environment alive, Westmoreland creates stunning, luminous tableaus evoking contemporaneous painters who depicted a lush, fin-de-siecle vision of locomotives, urban streets, and verdant gardens—an electric world on the brink of change, just like Colette.
The film is set to hit theaters on September 21st. Watch the trailer and let us know if it's a movie you might want to check out.