Chéri

UP CLOSE AND PERSONAL That’s another movie Pfeiffer, with Friend, wishes you’d forget.

In some ways, you could look at Chéri as a gentler gloss on Frears’s Dangerous Liaisons. The source material is a less obviously sinister affair, a 1920 novel by Colette that explores the love between Pfeiffer’s aging courtesan and the young rake (Friend) she acclimates to social customs, before he’s forced to marry someone else. The romance is fascinating, prompting us to sigh at the conventions of a bygone age; of course, today, the love between a 25-year-old man and a woman twice his age would never fall afoul of social norms. But Pfeiffer’s performance and handsome cinematography can’t save the film from a sense of plodding inevitability.

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