Cheri full of expensive frocks jealousy and bitchy insults delivered with air kisses
Cheri is one of those period dramas in which characters who never go to work lounge around on settees all day laughing in shrill falsetto voices while servants bring them huge punchbowls full of cognac. I think that the decadent opulence of the surroundings is supposed to be part of the appeal here so if you’re not the sort of viewer who can be moved to the point of rapture over the beauty of a staircase you might not find much to distract you from the basic unlikability of the leading man.
Set in France in the period later known as La Belle Époque the film finds aging courtesan Lea (Michelle Pfeiffer) pondering retiring from the world’s oldest profession. She shacks up with a 19-year-old boy partly for her own pleasure and partly as a favour to the lad’s ex-courtesan mother (Kathy Bates) who thinks the experience will do him good. Having been a kept woman for so long Lea relishes having her own kept boy around the house and winds up keeping him around for six years. The boy (Rupert Friend) has been an acquaintence of Pfeiffer’s character since childhood (it is she who nicknamed the lad “Cheri”) and she’s a bit of a surrogate mother to him. For six years Cheri does nothing but sleep drink boink Michelle Pfeiffer and spend her money. Then Cheri’s mother decides she wants grandkids and gets the foppish deadbeat married to a pretty 18-year-old girl (Felicity Jones). Lea accepts the end of her affair with Cheri graciously but is secretly heartbroken. Cheri seems to adapt well to married life at first but grows tired of it and winds up bouncing back and forth between his wife his ex-lover and various other distractions.
It’s a good thing that the film focuses more on Pfeiffer’s character than on Cheri himself because the guy is a spoiled brat who’s hard to empathize with. Equally fortunate is director Stephen Frears’s ( The Grifters Dangerous Liasons The Snapper ) inability to make a dull movie. Late in the film Lea has an excellent monologue that explains exactly what Cheri’s problem is and it actually kinda makes sense. Shortly afterwards there’s a satisfying yet abrupt ending that suggests that the filmmakers disliked the title character just as much as I did.
