Trademark: Often makes movies about love triangles that end tragically. This is how Stephen Frears, director of Dangerous Liaisons (1988) and The Queen (2007) is described on IMDB.

Even in the sound byte era, it’s a slight if not unkind and incongruous tagline.

Frears’ best work has delved into how individual identity, gender and cultural shifts affect personal relationships and survival in society. Witness the aforementioned films and Frears’ My Beautiful Laundrette, Prick Up Your Ears, The Grifters or The Hit.  The last two, though genre flicks, get downright noir gritty with those themes. Sammy and Rosie Get Laid (still not on DVD…) especially layers sexual and familial politics atop a London erupting in street clashes and social unrest.

But in the case of Chéri, that tagline is appropriate.

In Dangerous Liaisons, the cool, measured step of the principals through an acidic salon society allowed for an expert dissection of the human heart even as sexual one-upmanship left no one claiming check and mate.

But Chéri, based on Colette’s book of the same name, just flirts with surface. The surface of sumptuous Paris at the end of the belle époque and the surface of love that ends tragically.

Michelle Pfeiffer is Lea, a former courtesan who’s done well for herself. Aristocratic assignations in the past, she’s become “a woman of a certain age” and enters into a long, mutually loving relationship with a much younger man, Chéri, the son of a friend who’s also retired from the profession. After six years together, a marriage has been arranged for him and he must leave her. They find the clock they could ignore while they were together has kept perfect time. Neither one wiser, just older and muddled as to how they should carry on.

Chéri can be very much enjoyed as a period piece. The film has wit and heart and Pfeiffer really tries in the role, even shining at times, but everyone is enjoying themselves a little too much in the décolletage and lace so it’s reduced to playing pouty youth or dowdy matron. Caricature as character, even if precisely written and fleshed out, becomes cartoon. Colette was writing about barriers coming down and women who set trends and made no apologies for their lives. Frears’ Chéri doesn’t quite join her at the barricades. – [DVD]

Drama

Rated R

DVD Release Date: 10/20/09

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