Colette

In a conversation in her Paris apartment, Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette—mime, dancer, and novelist—considers whether to approve a proposed film about the houses she lived in. “I’m no longer photogenic,” she says, insisting despite being nearly 80 years old, with past marriages, an affair with a stepson, and intermittent lesbian relationships behind her. She refuses to mention the arthritis that now confines and troubles her, yet remains vivacious. Yannick Bellon’s captivating postmodernist film, which is as much a study of evanescence as any poem by Emily Dickinson, transitions into the film Colette, a few years before her death, has just said she does not want to make. Giving voice-over to her own commentary, she begins by revisiting the home in Saint-Sauveur-en-Puisaye, Yonne, where she was born.