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Turtles in Movies   Colette (2018)   Spoiler Alert ! Some of these pictures and descriptions may give away plot details that you might not want to know before watching the film.   This is a fictionalized account of the 19th - 20th-century French writer Colette, who is played by Keira Knightley. After they move to Paris, her husband convinces her to ghostwrite for him. Her books become bestsellers, but everybody thinks that he writes them. She struggles with him for creative ownership and the success and notoriety she deserves. At the beginning of the movie, Colette is a country girl who has just married a well-known author and moved to Paris where she attends her first society party. Her husband leaves her on her own and she feels as out of place as a bejeweled tortoise she finds stuck on a silver tray. She feels sorry for it, knowing that the tortoise would rather be outside in nature, as she would, herself. I don't know if this is something people actually did in the 1890s, but they're still doing it today. Just Google images of "bedazzled tortoise." (The movie Rum Diary also shows a bedazled tortoise or box turtle.) Painting turtle shells is known to be harmful, so I assume that gluing jewels to their shells is also harmful. At the very least, it's tacky and unnecessary. The tortoise we see is a live one, but I'm not sure what species.