The Oscar-winning "Colette," being about the eponymous elderly woman visiting the Nazi concentration camp where her brother died, is handled about as unevenly as one might imagine from a video-game studio and a Facebook subsidiary. Colette Marin-Carherine even mentions her reluctance until now and only with continued difficulty with such "morbid tourism." She cuts off the mayor of Nordhausen mid-speech during a dinner before the trek because she can't take anymore of it. Meanwhile, there's this generally unacknowledged camera, to make this documentary, persistently focused on her.
This is interspersed with archival footage of the French Resistance, Nazis and such that doesn't do particularly well beyond giving a very brief overview of the era. Along the way, we get some symbolism with train tracks, but that's been done at least since Alain Resnais's "Night and Fog" (1956). Neither do the documentarians do well to establish Colette's relationship with Lucie Fouble, with whom she visits the site, so when it comes to the moment that she passes on her late brother's ring to Fouble, it doesn't have the emotional impact that would've required some demonstration and building-up of their relationship on screen. Instead, it's watching a lot of grief and crying over tragedy as the spectator is both kept at a distance and is pushed into a feeling of intruding on moments that seem overly intimate for our presence given that we haven't got to know the women well.
