Chéri, a savorless classical literary adaptation

   In 1900’s, Paris is the city of luxury, of pleasure and adultery. Inside the capital, a microcosm of kept women live, love and grow old between themselves, isolated from the real world. One day, Lea de Lonval (Michelle Pfeiffer) takes an interest in Chéri, the son of another concubine, she had known as a child. With his mother’s agreement, she decided to entertain the melancholic twenty-year-old boy and to “educate” him (in a courtesan way).
After some pleasant years, the leisure has become love but the story goes wrong when Chéri’s mother decides to marry his son with a girl of his age. The difference of age between Lea and Cheri, which was not a problem up until now, provokes the end of the love story.

   Adapted from an eponym short story of Colette, this Stephen Frears movie looks too much like Dangerous liaisons by another French writer, Choderlos de Laclos and directed in 1988 by the same filmmaker. If the first one was a success, this one is a poor copy without the cruelty and the inspiration of his model. For the Anglo-Saxon cinema, France always seems paradise for upper-class people who dedicates all their time to luxury and love pleasures – even the decors, costumes, ambiance are meticulous but seem fake, like on a theater stage. The two main actors are sweet and nice, the “Chéri” is handsome, but that is not enough to make the film intense and striking, as Dangerous liaisons could have been.

   The main part of the film is based on conversations between the protagonists: the two old courtesans, Chéri and Lea, Chéri and Edmée, his very young wife. The language is subtle and precious; we can see how the words, spoken or written, were weapons in that society. The importance of correspondence is another common point with the Laclos novel; but here, the alternation of letters and duo conversations are too systematic to be very interesting.

   Finally, one of the stylistic interests of the film is its last shot. After she had definitively broken up with Chéri, Lea is looking at herself in a mirror - the camera -  and, thanks to a discreet but fine make-up, we can see her getting older and older in some minutes. Letting her last lover leave, Lea loses her status of loving and desirable woman. Despite the still present voice-over, the ageing and the loneliness of this from now on old lady manage to move us.

Chéri, by Stephen Frears, with Michelle Pfeiffer and Rupert Friend. 2009.

Comments

[stacey]

You've made some astute correlations with other films and analyzed the key storyline. Quite well-done.
Corrections: twenty-year-old boy, France,