The Hollywood Reporter: Film Review - Cheri

By Kirk Honeycutt
The Hollywood Reporter
Excerpt
February 10, 2009

Bottom Line: A smart and lushly romantic film adaptation of a Colette story of a doomed love.

BERLIN -- Stephen Frears never makes the same movie twice. What he does do though is make thoroughly professional and immensely entertaining stories that pay particular attention to characters, their flaws, emotions and deepest desires. In "Cheri," he has another dandy. Whether it will travel as far as his last film, "The Queen," is hard to say, but with a radiant Michelle Pfeiffer as his heroine, "Cheri" could well be another breakout hit.

Frears and his "Dangerous Liaisons" screenwriter Christopher Hampton team up again for a French period piece although this time it's La Belle Epoque -- 1906 Paris to be precise. The story is by Colette, so naturally it's about the demi-monde where courtesans are celebrated for their beauty and ability to please and ruin famous men in equal measure.

Our heroine is Pfeiffer's Lea de Lonval, a breathtaking beauty who is seeing her career coming to a thankful end. As Cole Porter would say, she has known all kinds of love -- except for true love. Then it hits her but good.

It all comes about when an old colleague and rival, Mme Peloux (a pitch-perfect Kathy Bates), whom she doesn't very much like, invites her for lunch to pick her brain about her indolent 19-year-old son Fred, whom Lea long ago nicknamed Cheri (Rupert Friend). Cheri will soon need to be successfully married off, but his casual hedonism makes him a poor bridegroom...

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