Print this article E-mail this article More articles by this author

Rating: Country: UK/France/Germany Release Date: October 20, 2009 Distributor: Miramax Director: · Stephen Frears Cast: · Michelle Pfeiffer · Kathy Bates · Rupert Friend · Felicity Jones Related Sites: · IMDb: Cheri Grade: B

Notable of its own accord—featuring a May-December romance that doesn’t ignore parental neglect or simplify emotions—“Cheri” also boasts the pedigree of playwright and screenwriter Christopher Hampton ("Atonement," "Carrington") and director Stephen Frears ("The Hit," "The Queen"), reuniting them with Michelle Pfeiffer, the ingénue from their previous collaboration, “Dangerous Liaisons”. Toss in the fact that “Cheri” is based on Colette’s seemingly unfilmable novels Cheri and The Last of Cheri, and we have a film that comes with a hefty weight on its shoulders going in. And while this clever costume drama boasts many successes, it falls short of being something memorable, crisply notarizing the observations and emotions in a matter-of-fact manner that misses much of the nuance in the source material.

With a wry, but removed and overly succinct, opening narration, we learn of the social significance of the courtesan in Pre-WWI Paris and the Belle Epoch, lording significance but relegated to the sidelines in a social context, given the nature of their work. With few friends, Lea (Pfeiffer) remains close to those who she would ordinarily disassociate from, such as Madame Peloux (Kathy Bates), a retired woman of loose morals. While contemplating retirement, Lea is asked by Peloux to teach her 19-year-old son Cheri (Rupert Friend) a thing or two about women, which starts dispassionately and leads to a six year romance that is cut short when a marriage is arranged between the boy and a young woman of note named Edmee (Felicity Jones).

Of course, we understand that a romance between a man of 19-25 and a woman in her 50’s has as much to do with his immaturity and need for maternal reassurance, as it does her anxiety about aging. Resultantly, Lea grieves the loss of the boy who helped maintain her inner-youth and misses the sense of comfort that comes with a lack of pretense in a partnership. Cheri struggles with his role as man of the household, unhappy with the emotional demands a younger woman puts on him.

While this does sound like a tale of doomed love and sweeping melodrama, “Cheri” is nothing of the sort, documenting mainly the quiet pain that a life of whimsical performance and emotional restraint can have on someone. It’s not a tearjerker, instead trying to give us an impression of what goes on beneath one's game face.

Strangely enough, both Bates and Pfeiffer do an effective job of doing just that: dramatically performing their lot in life with boisterous laughs and polite smiles, reciting dialogue theatrically, while occasionally revealing a quiet look of humanity for only the audience to see. The problem with this is implicit, as most audience members will see only this campy overacting adjacent Rupert Friend’s dry, straightforward approach, missing the overt construct and implications of life as performance.

Regardless, these performances are sharp and aware, even if the muscular script occasionally lets them down. Ameliorating this heightened theatricality, however, is absolutely amazing costume and set design, giving Madame Peloux loud excessive outfits and cluttered, gaudy environments, while Lea dresses simply, surrounding herself with elegance.

Certainly clever, “Cheri” suffers mainly from its own detached construct, leaving us viewers somewhat removed from the preceding as a result.

Included with the DVD are two inconsequential deleted scenes, wherein Lea talks of home repairs and Cheri looks for lost boots, along with a brief “Making Of”, which discusses how the film came to be.

Technical specifications are fair, with the sound coming through with great nuance, despite it being a talking heads pic, while picture suffers from occasional shadowing and lack of contrast.