Stephen Frears (2009)

According to Wikipedia, this is the second cinema film of the Colette novel (or, more precisely, novel(la)s – Chéri and The Last of Chéri).  There have also been two TV adaptations and I dimly remember the 1973 BBC version.  Chéri is the love story of a couple for whom having sex is a way of life – a man in his mid-twenties and a woman old enough to be his mother (and who is a longstanding acquaintance of his actual mother). Chéri, as Frédéric Peloux is known, is youthful but dissipated; Léa de Lonval has loved professionally and largely dispassionately.   The affair between them is sparked by physical attraction; it becomes more complicated and difficult when they fall in love.  The picture begins with a scene-setting voiceover, which explains the status of the leading courtesans of fin de siècle and belle époque Paris, as the camera moves around framed photographs of some of the best known of them – Liane de Pougy et al.   It settles eventually on the face of Léa – the face, that is, of Michelle Pfeiffer.  The sepia photograph fools no one:  her look doesn’t fit with the examples of the real thing – it’s too modern.  But once she appears on the screen, Pfeiffer, in physical terms, carries all before her.

She has a head start in this role:  we knew her as a glorious young actress but she’s been largely absent from the screen in recent years (except for the small part in Hairspray).  Back in a starring role, she’s still beautiful but undeniably older (although she doesn’t look her 51 years).  It’s not just that she’s marvellous to watch, shot by shot.  Pfeiffer has a strong presence:  she knows how to make an entrance and she wears Consolata Boyle’s gowns superbly (it must be very rewarding to design the costumes and see them brought to life like this).  When she stands against an Alma-Tadema balcony and sky in Biarritz, when she races upstairs in reaction to good news, when – in the film’s final shot – the frame freezes on her beautifully defeated face, Pfeiffer is all you could want and more.   Vocally, she’s less persuasive.  At the start, I found her relatively bland voice an interesting idea in itself.  You could believe that a courtesan as lovely and sensually alert as this wouldn’t need to rely on how she spoke as a means of seduction.   But, as the film goes on, a breathy hush settles over too many of Pfeiffer’s lines; except when she’s snappish or in emotional extremity, the rhythm of her readings is monotonous – and she rarely suggests a tension between what Léa says and what she’s actually feeling.

This is the first time I’ve seen Kathy Bates playing a non-American (she’s Charlotte, Chéri’s mother) and the first time, apart from Titanic, I’ve seen her in period costume earlier than the 1950s.  It’s also the first time I’ve been disappointed by her.  She seems constrained – by the clothes and the dialogue. (It may be no coincidence that the only times she rings true are when she laughs and there are no words to contend with – although she made me laugh with the line, ‘I always thought he was one of the duller kings’.)  Bates is ‘doing a character’ here, effortfully and uncomfortably.  She doesn’t do enough, though, to suggest, for example, Charlotte’s schadenfreude that Léa, who has kept her figure in a way Charlotte hasn’t, still gets to suffer as a result of getting older.   The lack of spark between Bates and Pfeiffer is a real letdown.    We’re given to understand that Léa and Charlotte have met regularly for years without liking each other.  The situation seems to present easy opportunities for being smilingly sociable in a vibrantly insincere way but their exchanges are stiff and colourless.  There’s a risk with this story that Chéri will be vacuously beautiful – a reflection of what Léa sees in him and without much independent life.   This isn’t true of Rupert Friend’s pretty but prematurely debauched Chéri, who occasionally seems stunned by – yet trapped in – his selfish superficiality.  It’s an intelligent performance – if Chéri never becomes the main focus of interest, that’s probably intrinsic to the material rather than a reflection on Friend.   As Chéri’s pure young bride Edmée, Felicity Jones has a strong moment when incredulous laughter turns to convulsive weeping.

None of the playing is bad but I was surprised that such an accomplished director of actors didn’t orchestrate it more confidently.  If memory serves, Stephen Frears handled the cast expertly in Dangerous Liaisons, his previous collaboration with Pfeiffer (and Christopher Hampton, who has written the screenplay for Chéri).  Perhaps in that film, the Americans were more comfortable in continental European roles because there weren’t any British actors in sizeable parts to confuse the issue and the barbed dialogue was more formally reassuring.  Hampton’s dialogue here, although it seems mostly proficient, is trickier – ‘period’ speech but clearly more casual than the stylised wit of Dangerous Liaisons.   Some of the cast sound careful and self-conscious speaking their lines (Rupert Friend handles the dialogue the most easily).    There are decent actors – like Nicola McAuliffe as a fortune teller, Anita Pallenberg and Harriet Walter as a couple of other sexual pillars of society – whose playing betrays the uncertainty of how to pitch a performance when you’ve only one or two short scenes in which to make an impression.  Frances Tomelty, with a little more screen time as Léa’s maid Rose, is more relaxed and convincing.  Frears himself provides the voiceover narration:  his delivery works well at first – fruity without being actorish – although the unprofessional phrasing makes it gradually less effective.

All in all, Chéri is dramatically and emotionally underwhelming.  Much of the pleasure to be had is in the technical details of the belle époque – the costumes, the bowls of flowers, the bits of china that we see.  (And the music by Alexandre Desplat is skilful:  it sounds like pastiche to begin with but it turns into something gracefully incisive.)   The film is, in more ways than one, both good looking and lacking in animation – the cinematographer Darius Khondji lights the naked flesh on display in a way that suggests art of the period but not always living bodies.  At one point, Léa wistfully compares her aging arms with the handles of an antique vase and this made me think that Stephen Frears’s whole approach here was rather like that of a man entrusted with a valuable, breakable object.  There are times when it doesn’t pay to be so cautious:  Frears keeps control of his precious goods but the quality that made them precious to start with still somehow slips through his hands.

17 May 2009