Review: Cheri

Colette’s ruthless sensibility gets lost in what amounts to just another costume melodrama.

Cheri
Photo: Miramax Films

Putting aside her fragrant memoirs, Cheri and The Last of Cheri are probably Colette’s finest achievement as a writer; they lucidly express her faith in materialism as well as her convincing belief that sensuality is the highest of all human pursuits. These two novels about an aging courtesan and her devouring passion for a young pretty boy are many things, but most of all they are French to their core, and the rude English narration that begins Stephen Frears’s adaptation of Cheri strikes a jarring note right from the start. The Belle Epoque clothes look as luscious as pastries and the décor is properly sumptuous, but the scenes are paced in such a jerky way that the film seems like it was slapped together too quickly. In her first major film role in what feels like a very long time, Michelle Pfeiffer gives an uneven performance as Lea de Lonval, a part once earmarked for Jessica Lange, who has a producing credit on this film. At her worst, when she’s trying to be calculating, Pfeiffer makes her face into a weird mask of hauteur and reads her lines as if she were in a high school play, yet there are moments toward the end when she reaches a ravaged kind of emotion that recalls her best work from the ’80s and early ’90s. Unfortunately, she has to contend with a brutally miscast Kathy Bates, who overacts all over the place as a retired adventuress and mother to Lea’s beloved Cheri (Rupert Friend). Colette’s ruthless sensibility gets lost in what amounts to just another costume melodrama, and though she was never averse to crass commercialism when she was selling her books, surely she would be amused that this film version of Cheri is being sold as a kind of “cougar with her boy toy” romp. Cheri and Last of Cheri pay serious tribute to worldly pleasures as a sort of “fuck you” to death and evil and wrinkles on the brow, but you won’t feel even an instant of that kind of steel in this graceless movie.

Score: 
 Cast: Michelle Pfeiffer, Rupert Friend, Kathy Bates, Anita Pallenberg  Director: Stephen Frears  Screenwriter: Christopher Hampton  Distributor: Miramax Films  Running Time: 93 min  Rating: R  Year: 2009  Buy: Video, Soundtrack

Dan Callahan

Dan Callahan’s books include The Camera Lies: Acting for Hitchcock , Barbara Stanwyck: The Miracle Woman, and Vanessa: The Life of Vanessa Redgrave. He has written about film for Sight & Sound, Film Comment, Nylon, The Village Voice, and more.

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