wcbe: : Chéri (2009-06-17)

After you get over how beautiful the lighting makes 51 year-old Michelle Pfeiffer playing her age and how old it makes 28 year-old Rupert Friend playing 19, there's not much else to love about Chéri . Or maybe you can love the sumptuous 19th century Paris estates, cars, and gowns of the idle rich, whose lives will morph into something less glamorous as the Bel Epoque slides into WWI.

Colette's two novels about Chéri (Friend), the son of wealthy courtesan Madame Peloux (Kathy Bates), are not just about an indolent but beautiful rich slacker; they also follow the good fortune of Lea de Lonval (Pfeiffer), an unusually beautiful and profitable courtesan, who has shrewdly prepared herself for financial comfort but forget the cardinal rule of prostitutes: Don't fall in love.

After six years of lover's paradise, Chéri and Lea part as the takes an arranged bride. And that's all there is, folks, as the film moves from a robust ramble about the various courtesans to a dreary hour of Twilight-like longing between this old-fashioned Harold and Maude. Director Steven Frears, who has had a fair share of intriguing films and characters, just lets the camera make love to Pfeiffer and Friend without fleshing out the characters to let is know what is so loveable to be longing for so long. Writer Christopher Hampton with Dangerous Liaisons and Atonement on his resume can't seem to muster a memorable line or develop his characters from flat clichés into round characters.

I do concede that Kathy Bates delivering this line saved the film for the moment: "Don't you find that when the skin is a little less firm, it holds perfume so much better?" Said to Michelle Pfeiffer, these lines give Bates bite of the year honors and a brief respite from spare, meaningless dialogue.