Keira Knightley who acts mostly in period dramas such as “Pride & Prejudice” to avoid the rape scenes prevalent in modern films, has made a point about Hollywood rape culture — at quite the right time.
The actress says that she don’t really do films set in the modern day because the female characters – in these films – nearly always get raped. She always find something distasteful in the way women are being portrayed, whereas she have always found very inspiring characters offered to her in historical pieces. There has been some improvement. She is suddenly being sent scripts with present-day women who are not raped in the very first five pages and are not simply there to be the loving girlfriend or even a wife.
This all does explain a string of historical films in her wake, from “Pride & Prejudice” , “The Imitation Game” and “Anna Karenina” to “A Dangerous Method” & “King Arthur”.
She has chosen to be portrayed as a noble, strong women from the past rather than participate in the spectacle of rape as a device of plot.
And she has done it again and she is currently doing press rounds for her role in the movie Colette, where she is playing the legendary French novelist.
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She has chosen here an intellectually exciting, sexually liberated, and fascinating historical figure who is strayed by her husband.
Despite the fact that directors tried to get the film funded for more than a decade, it is sensible that it should be released during the #MeToo movement. It’s a story of a salacious feminist owning her sexuality, who produces great work, yet finds herself being exploited by the man who is closest to her for a short time — until the heroine breaks free.
Her decision to eschew the industry’s predilection for sexual assault plot lines is interesting for a few reasons. One, we’re in the middle of a huge reckoning in terms of real-life rape and sexual assault in the industry “Hollywood” – yet, as she does point out, we have been comfortably watching fictional stories of assault for a long long time, nearly by men writers and directors. It is almost a rite of passage for a female actress to play a character who gets assaulted.
Secondly, I am interested in any actor with the agency and resolve to turn down the roles for moral reasons. It is how I would like thinking I would be behaving, if were an actor.
