CHÉRI
Directed by Stephen Frears
Produced by Bill Kenwright Andras Hamori & Tracey Seaward
Written by Christopher Hampton, based on the novel Chéri, and a little bit of The Last of Chéri, both by Colette
Released by Miramax
USA/France/Germany. 91 min. Rated R
With Michelle Pfeiffer, Rupert Friend, Felicity Jones & Kathy Bates
 

If ever there was a role to be cast based solely on looks, it’s Colette’s Chéri, the passive, petulant pretty boy kept in a luxurious cocoon by a recently retired courtesan, 24 years his senior, in pre-World War I Paris. His looks mesmerize everyone, especially himself. In Colette’s 1920 acidic confection of a novel, he indulgently preens in front mirrors, and Colette devotes as much space describing his tanned skin, dark eyes, and long lashes as his not-so-deep thoughts.

Besides nicknaming him Chéri, Léa constantly calls him her “pretty,” and for good reason. It’s not his personality that drives her to spoil him, at the excess of 60 thousand Francs a year, beginning when he’s 19. In the film, she admits it: no matter how hard she tries, she can’t describe his character because he doesn’t really have one. He’s an empty canvas, prime for grooming. But Léa shatters a rule in her profession—she has fallen in love, though in the back of her mind she knows their tryst can’t last, not just because of the age difference; one day he will marry. 

As Chéri, Rupert Friend looks like an Edwardian lounge lizard in flowing silk pajamas, with his foppish hair obscuring his face—more Byronic than Belle Epoque, and not physically matching Léa’s adulation of him. Nor do Chéri and Léa generate any carnal heat; their coupling is desultory. This discrepancy is made more apparent later in the film when Léa, on the prowl, sets her eyes on a wide-eyed vulnerable slab of beefcake (Jake Walker) in the south of France. The brief scenes of their Mediterranean rendezvous inject the film with much needed hormones.

Luminous, regal, and willowy, Michelle Pfeiffer’s Léa looks great in the period finery. Yet instead of a toughness or imperiousness of a hardened professional, Pfeifer brings a tangible fragility, which was most apparent in her last collaboration with director Stephen Frears, Dangerous Liaisons, where she was so stunningly beautiful and without fault that you secretly craved for her to be knocked down a peg or two. As in so many of her roles, there’s an unspoken admonition of look, but don’t touch, and not of a woman who openly puts herself on the market for the next goldmine. The film’s opening narration describes Léa much more harshly, equating a courtesan to a whore. Regardless, melancholic dejection becomes Pfeiffer (maybe it’s because of her huge blue eyes) more than a persuasive seductress.

However, Christopher Hampton’s faithful script retains the essence of Colette’s biting bon mots without sounding like clipped-together zingers too clever to be spontaneous. (Léa’s line, “A liaison of six years is like following your husband out to the colonies: when you get back again nobody recognizes you and you’ve forgotten how to dress,” could have also been written by Oscar Wilde.) That’s largely due to the effortless sniping between Léa and her lifelong rival (Kathy Bates), a retired courtesan and Chéri’s mother. The actresses bring to life Colette’s frequently brittle verbal jousting, most notably Bates, who has a predatory gleam in her eyes as she tastes victory. Kent Turner
June 29, 2009