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Movies & TV

Cheri

CHERI (Maple, 2009) D: Stephen Frears, w/ Michelle Pfeiffer, Rupert Friend. Rating: NNNN DVD package: NN Rating: NNNN

Cheri isn’t quite the classic that Stephen Fears made when he last worked with Michelle Pfeiffer, on Dangerous Liaisons. The story and characters are less complex and dramatic, but it’s still a beautifully made love story.

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Pfeiffer plays Lea de Lonval, a successful courtesan in belle epoque Paris. She’s thinking about retirement when she takes a young lover, Cheri (Rupert Friend), the son of a retired courtesan (gleefully crass Kathy Bates). Cheri is your classic vapid boy-toy, but they hit it off and spend six years lounging around a hothouse of fabulous costumes and decor. Then his mother decides to marry him off. The lovers are not pleased.

Pfeiffer has the delicacy and control to be persuasive as a woman accustomed to faking love and concealing her real emotions, but it’s hard to understand what she sees in Friend’s Cheri, who’s playful but self-centred and none too bright.

Frears is more interested in creating a mood of elegaic regret than in realistic drama, and he succeeds spectacularly, aided by Darius Khondji’s lush images and Alexandre Desplat’s melancholy score with its urgent undercurrents.

A brief, pleasant making-of doc features Pfeiffer’s humorous remarks on the subject of corsets, a bit about set decoration in relation to character and a few words from Frears, who is funny enough to make you wish he’d done a commentary.

EXTRAS Making-of doc, deleted scenes. Widescreen. English audio. English, French, Spanish subtitles.

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