Chéri Review

While the cracks have started to show in Michelle Pfeiffer's famous porcelain visage, her acting is tighter than it's ever been. She casually pulls off a hair-raising balancing act as Lea De Lonval, a woman who makes a virtue of being shallow and yet conveys a profound depth at the same time. She is, after all, hiding a lifetime of fear and insecurity behind that powder-puffed mask. Director Stephen Frears seems to do the reverse, making everything look pretty but forgetting to bring a strong enough vision to fill the widescreen canvas.

Chéri works as a companion piece to Dangerous Liaisons, a film set in the same period also scripted by Christopher Hampton and starring Pfeiffer (then, as a young newlywed tempted by John Malkovich's bored aristocrat).

This time she is the one who threatens to break up the marriage between a pretty ingénue (Felicity Jones) and her feckless beau Fred, known to Lea by his pet name Chéri (Rupert Friend). To be fair though, she did see him first. In fact it's the mother of the 19-year-old, Lea's old cohort Madame Peloux (a politely leering Kathy Bates), who gives her implicit licence to seduce him in an effort to exert some control over his rebellion. Chéri moves in with Lea where they do little except satisfy each others' carnal desires until Peloux sees fit to marry him off to the daughter of another wealthy courtesan. Until this point it would be easy to dismiss the film for being as vacuous as the leads proudly claim themselves to be; counting money, quaffing gin and spitting venom at polite society whose rejection of them means they're forced to rub shoulders with each other. What grates even more is Frears' own pinch-nosed narration which, as well as plugging gaps in the plot, underlines the jokes. As social satires go, it's about as restrained as a wench's bosom. Lea's saving grace is that she is self-aware so there is no need for this voiceover. At one point she refuses to besmirch Cheri's character because "he doesn't have one". It is only when he's gone to be groomed for his wedding that she understands his value. Between them there had been no pretence, a precious comfort in a world that judges her solely on appearance.

Lea and Chéri tell each other that the relationship couldn't have lasted, but after the break-up, they struggle to stay aloof. Each is humbled in their efforts to deny love; Lea having to endure Peloux's backhanded comments and (worse than that) the prospect of getting old and dying alone; Chéri, trapped not only by marriage but by the realisation that he will never have lasting happiness.

As their humanity peeks through, the tone of the film becomes less caustic, more melancholy. Rupert Friend, who did the stiff upper lip in The Young Victoria, gives an assured performance. Despite a lot of aggressive, self-indulgent behavior, he comes across a tragic figure, a victim of Lea's over-attentiveness as much as his mother's negligence. Even so, the film belongs to Pfeiffer. When Lea must finally look at herself in the mirror, it provides the one memorable image, a single close-up more eloquent than hours' worth of voiceover.