Aging, Michelle Pfeiffer has become what Oscar Wilde called "That abomination of nature: A Handsome Woman". Her very trimmed figure looks spectacular sheathed in very glamorous Belle Epoque dresses and looking at her with contemporary eyes, that's fine.
What the director forgot in recreating so beautifully, so painfully all the paraphernalia necessary to reproduce that magnificent time in history was... the ideal of feminine beauty at the time.
We glaringly see it in the same old pictures (authentic) shown at the start of the movie, pictures of the great beauties then, like Lillie Langtry, Lia de Putti, la Bella Otero, etc. and it's obvious that those beauties where more on the side of Marilyn Monroe than Michelle Pfeiffer, who looks like a window display mannequin with no curves in the right places and no minimal waistline (Hourglass figure painfully obtained thanks to an oppressing corset, but there it was).
To give us total recall of that time our protagonist should have been somebody a bit fatter than Ms. Pfeiffer, since we readily forget all the changes the feminine figure has suffered just in the last 100 years; what was considered fashionable or desirable then was quite different from now, and a thin woman was totally undesirable.
The film is nice, in a very superficial way, since its main flaw is irreparable, because speaking English in this superbly French story, we get a jarring note, and it's this: All the "decadent" morality, social behavior, points of view about richly kept elegant cocottes by the upper class French men is something totally unknown to puritan Victorian English society. This utterly French "Menage a Trois" is totally lost in this English version of Paris life at the turn of the century.
The house where she lives, the street, the interior locations, the dresses, all that is perfectly fine (more than fine, exquisite), but THE ESENCE of Colette masterpiece is not there. Due to the strong visual appeal in interiors, color schemes, Art Nuveau architecture and Belle Epoque fashions, this is mainly eye candy for dress designers and interior decorators.
