Review: Pfeiffer radiant, but 'Cheri' never shines

LOS ANGELES -- Back in 1988, director Stephen Frears and screenwriter Christopher Hampton teamed up for "Dangerous Liaisons," one of the juiciest guilty pleasures ever. Reveling in high-class deception and manipulation, the film earned seven Academy Award nominations including best supporting actress for Michelle Pfeiffer, and it won three.

Frears and Hampton have reunited for "Cheri," with Pfeiffer as their star, but the film has none of the same irresistible meat or bite.

Pfeiffer is luminous as ever as an aging courtesan in belle epoque Paris -- the schemer this time instead of the pawn. But the romance in which she finds herself, the one that supposedly upends her carefully crafted world, is totally implausible from the start. And that's a problem, because that's the thing we're supposed to care about.

Based on the novels "Cheri" and "The Last of Cheri" by Colette, the film features Pfeiffer as Lea de Lonval, a venerable seductress on the verge of retirement at the end of a lucrative career. Her longtime rival, the catty gossip Charlotte Peloux (a shrilly over-the-top Kathy Bates), asks Lea to knock some sense into her 19-year-old son (Rupert Friend), an incorrigible party boy whom Lea long ago nicknamed Cheri.

Trouble is, they fall in love with each other and end up in a six-year romance, despite the difference in their ages, personalities and life experiences. At least we're meant to believe they fall in love with each other: They keep saying so, but they have so little chemistry and the development of their relationship seems so truncated, it's hard to accept.

Lea is supposed to be ravaged with loneliness and jealousy when Charlotte forces Cheri into a marriage with the more age-appropriate (and wealthy) Edmee (Felicity Jones), daughter of yet another successful courtesan. Similarly, Cheri is supposed to be lovesick, distracted by his pining and incapable of being an attentive husband.

Maybe their love seemed achingly real and doomed in novel form; here it just feels too rushed. Cheri comes across as androgynous and rather asexual; more crucially, he's also a petulant brat. Makes you wonder what such a smart woman would see in him, besides the fact that he probably makes her feel younger by association; even she remarks about him early on, "I can't criticize his character, mainly because he doesn't seem to have one." The bemused narration from Frears himself doesn't help.

And so a pivotal scene toward the end, in which it appears Lea and Cheri may end back together, doesn't have nearly the weight or drama that it should.

"Cheri" is always lovely to look at, shot lushly in decadent settings by cinematographer Darius Khondji. And Pfeiffer wears the period clothes fabulously, as you would expect; costume designer Consalata Boyle, an Oscar nominee for Frears' "The Queen," must have had a ball dressing her in elegant, formfitting gowns and ornate hats.

The film itself, though, is all dressed up with nowhere to go.

"Cheri," a Miramax Films release, is rated R for some sexual content and brief drug use. Running time: 92 minutes. Two stars out of four.