"Colette" is an American documentary short film from 2020 that runs for 25 minutes and is almost exclusively in the French language. There is one brief segment in German, but part of it is translated, so you will not need subtitles for it really to understand what the entire film is all about. Obviously, if you are not fluent in French, you should get subtitles there and maybe the best solution is to simply watch the upload by The Guardian on Youtube just like more than 600,000 other people did over the last three years. This film here won the Oscar for Best Documentary Short the year when it was available and that actually made the Giacchinos one of the most successful sibling pairs with the Oscars in recent years because Michael is of course one of the defining film composers these days who also won an Oscar already and here his brother Anthony, who is the writer and director of this little film, managed the same achievement. The movie scored on other awards shows too and, according to imdb, won every time when it was nominated somewhere. The title character here is Colette, who was 90 when this film got made and is still alive now in 2024 when I watched the movie. Nice to see. Maybe he can actually make it to 100 as she talked about the young woman in the video who accompanied her reaching the age of 100 one day reflecting on the past and remembering that she was there that day. Said young woman is Lucie Fouble and initially I was just not sure why she was there at all in the film except for being pretty attractive, but I guess she is a bit of an interviewer, also made sure they were going the right directions to get where they wanted to and also she emotionally comforts Colette on more than one occasion, even if she needs it herself too, so the women give each other strength you can say.
The fact that this won an Oscar is not too surprising if we see that this is a Nazi-themed documentary. Colette takes a journey back into her past when she travels to Germany to visit the place where her brother was held captive by the Nazis, where he slept and also where he died. I would the first of the two emotional parts here was maybe the highlight for me, even if I hesitate a bit to call it a "highlight" really. The word does not seem right given the context, but yeah it was sad to see Colette's pain there and also how contagious it was in terms of Lucie. The ending was pretty similar when they visit another location, but for me it was not quite as effective as the aforementioned segment. Early on, when still in Caen, we see Colette feeding a pigeon on her window like a random old lady would. A little later we find out the past she had, how she was in the resistance back then during the German occupation, even if her weapon was the pen really and not the sword or the gun, but well look at Sophie Scholl about whom you can say a similar thing and she died for it, even if her writing was very much different compared to Colette's. Watched a Sophie Scholl film the other day, so maybe that is why the memory is still fresh there for me to include it here. Anyway, the biggest issue this documentary here had is that it was just way too short. It felt almost disrespectful to Colette how they rushed her story in here in under half an hour. As a consequence, also "helped" by the slightly wild editing there, the scene with Colette not feeling too well when the German ex-mayor gives a little speech almost felt a bit comical how she is so tough there in the end with what she says that everybody needs to sit down. Maybe it would have been something or a behavior her mother would also have shown.
There is some talk about the mother, her mentality, but also a really cruel thing she said to Colette and I understand how one can remember this for their entire life if a parent says something like that to you as a young person. Besides, Colette was feeling her own pain too because she just lost a sibling. This should not be forgotten. So yeah, it is a good documentary, an important documentary, but one that should not have been put into a short film format. Or at least another 20 minutes longer, but I think 95-100 minutes would have been the right way to go here. And I am also positive that Colette would have had or actually still has more than just a few anecdotes and memories she could have given us to reach said running time. With this decision we also would have understood more about her work for the resistance and actually vital questions like the one from the very beginning why she has never been to Germany and wants to go now would have gotten the screen time and details they deserved. In this documentary format they did not. But the positive recommendation was never I doubt for me and during some of the previously mentioned moments I even thought that I could give 4 stars out of 5 here, but I guess for now 3 out of 5 feels more fitting. Also, I think the woman has some solid humor really, which of course does not come through too quickly here because of the heavy subject and also I am not sure if the statement she made about joining the resistance and how it is not the same like joining a club or leisure group was meant from her in a little tongue-in-cheek way, but I had to smile or maybe even laugh a little bit. So yeah, you know where to find this documentary and I suggest you go watch it. Better is still seeing people like Colette live on stage during interviews, but despite the runtime issue here, this film could not have been much better. Thumbs-up.
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