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.
Direction
Bellon's seamless blend of documentary and dreamlike reconstruction.
Writing
Colette's own wry, self-aware narration — no filter, all wit.
Director
Yannick Bellon
Trivia, insights & behind the scenes
Colette was the first woman in France to receive a state funeral — this was filmed just years before her 1954 death, capturing her final self-curated performance.
Bellon's 'postmodernist' structure — Colette rejecting a biopic that then unfolds anyway — mirrors how Colette herself constantly rewrote her own life in her novels.
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