Colette - DaaVeeDee

Colette (DVD) (*)

$25.99

Language Selections:
English ( Subtitles )
French ( Dolby Digital 2.0 )

Product Origin/Format:
France ( PAL/Region 0 )

Running Time:
29 min + 15 min extras

Aspect Ratio:
Fullscreen

Special Features:
Interactive Menu
Scene Access
Black & White
Remastered

Movie filmed in 1951 and produced in:
France ( France, Benelux )

Directed By:
Yannick Bellon

Written By:
Yannick Bellon
Colette

Actors:
Colette ..... Herself / Narrator
Jean Cocteau ..... Himself
Maurice Goudeket ..... Himself
Pauline Tissandier ..... Herself
Georges Wague ..... Himself

Synopsis:

French writer Sidonie Gabrielle Colette (1873-1954) was both a popular and literary sensation. Known simply as Colette, she scandalized French society with her three marriages and her career as a racy music-hall performer and mime artist. She was also one of the finest prose stylists of her era, and a legendary figure in Paris. Her work often explored the struggle between independent identity and passionate love, and asserted female sexuality in a male-dominated world. Colette won many awards for her work and was the first woman chosen as a member of France's prestigious Goncourt Academy. A prolific writer, her semi-autobiographical novels include the Claudine and Chéri series, as well as The Vagabond, Music-Hall Sidelights and Gigi (on which the Oscar-winning musical was based). As she narrates the story herself, Colette looks back over her carefree childhood, the inspiration she drew from her rural homes, and her career as a performer. The film, which includes congenial conversations between her and acclaimed filmmaker and friend Jean Cocteau, shows a woman who may be near the end of her life but who remains dynamic and engaged - and occupied with needlepoint.

In conversation, in her Paris apartment, Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette, mime, dancer, novelist, wonders whether she should give the green light to a proposed film about the houses in which she lived. 'I'm no longer photogenic,' she insists; nearly 80, marriages, affair with a stepson and intermittent lesbianism behind her, refusing now even to mention the arthritis that confines and assaults her, Colette is vivacious. Yannick Bellon's captivating postmodernist film, as much a study of evanescence as any poem by Dickinson, segues into the film that Colette, a few years before her end, has just said she doesn't want to do. Giving voice(over) to her own commentary, she goes back, first, to the home in Saint-Sauveur-en-Puisaye, Yonne, where she was born. Bellon's camera is poignantly liberated, anticipating Truffaut's in Les mistons (1958) and The 400 Blows (1959).

A tour of France visiting and describing the houses associated with Colette and her works. Includes extracts from a film showing Colette in her music hall days and a conversation between the novelist and Jean Cocteau.

This product was added to our catalog on Monday 08 July, 2013.

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