MOVIE REVIEW : An Unbecoming ‘Becoming Colette’

Movies about famous writers’ lives are rarely satisfying. It may make dramatic sense that a writer’s work and a writer’s life should be depicted as all-of-a-piece but things rarely work out so neatly in the real world. What we too often get at the movies is a diminishing of both the life and the art.

In the case of Colette, the temptation to connect her life and her art is especially understandable since so much of what she wrote made the connection for us anyway. But that’s no excuse for the vapid, perfumey “Becoming Colette” (selected theaters), which treats the marvelously, scandalously naughty writer as some kind of coltish bimbo. The film, which was directed by Danny Huston and scripted by Ruth Graham, has an airless, disembodied quality--not exactly what one wants from a movie about a sensualist of genius.

The film (rated R for sensuality) picks up Colette’s life as a provincial young girl and takes it through her marriage in 1893 to the Parisian writer and roue Henry Gauthier-Villar, who first encouraged her to turn her schoolgirl scribblings into scandalous fictionalized entertainments--the “Claudine” books. He also appropriated those books under his pseudonym, “Willy.” Colette’s struggle to break free of Willy’s influence is the film’s theme: She wants to live her life under her own authorship.

It would help if Mathilda May, who plays Colette, gave any inkling of an inner life. She’s a pretty, pouty cipher--Leslie Caron with a lobotomy. No wonder everybody thinks Willy wrote the books. As Klaus Maria Brandauer plays him, Willy is such a wily, smarmy layabout that his inner life practically reaches out and grabs you by the throat. Brandauer does the only real acting in “Becoming Colette,” but it’s not one of his proudest moments either.

It takes skill to make a truly sensual film in a period setting. All that upholstery and finery and fancy lighting tends to cut back on the sheer spontaneous aliveness of things. This was one of the drawbacks of Phil Kaufman’s “Henry & June,” which finally was too decorously tasteful. “Becoming Colette” is reminiscent of the Kaufman film but far less sophisticated. It’s so tasteful that even the sex scenes, like the centerpiece one between Colette and Willy’s mistress (Virginia Madsen), end up looking like a coupling of waxworks.

Lust, where is thy sting?

‘Becoming Colette’

Klaus Maria Brandauer: Willy

Mathilda May: Colette

Virginia Madsen: Polaire

Paul Rhys: Chapo

A Castle Hill Productions release. Director Danny Huston. Producers Heinz Bibo and Peer Oppenheimer. Executive producers Todd Black, Kathryn Galan and Joe Wizan. Screenplay by Ruth Graham. Cinematographer Wolfgang Treu. Editors Peter Taylor and Roberto Silvi. Costumes Barbara Baum. Music John Scott. Production designers Jan Schlubach and Berge Douy. Running time: 1 hour, 37 minutes.

MPAA-rated R (sensuality).