Chéri

It figures: Blockbuster season finally yields a movie for adults, and it’s this vignette from a bygone era about the dissolution of youth. Chéri (Rupert Friend), the 19-year-old son of a retired Belle Epoque courtesan (Kathy Bates), is a feckless and beautiful brat, taken on as an erotic disciple by his mother’s one-time rival (Michelle Pfeiffer), then taken from her by an arranged marriage to a more suitable girl his own age (Felicity Jones). To achieve this forlorn and beautifully decorated melodrama, Christopher Hampton has synthesized and adapted two Colette novellas for director Stephen Frears. It’s no help that the movie’s period trappings invite a comparison with Hampton and Frears’ more electric Dangerous Liaisons, in which Pfeiffer also starred, nor that its thematic concerns mirror those of Frears’ recent and more topical The Queen. And if you have to read in an allegory about aging actresses in today’s Hollywood to give it any currency, what does that say about the substance of the film itself? Even if not among the very best efforts from its distinguished screenwriter and director, Chéri is quite commanding when it manages after a while to gather some force. And maybe it is among the best from Pfeiffer, whose performance here is so wise and radiantly self-possessed.