Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #4406 in DVD
• Released on: 2009-09-21
• Rating: Suitable for 15 years and over
• Aspect ratio: 1.78:1
• Formats: Anamorphic, PAL
• Original language: English
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 89 minutes

Amazon.co.uk Review
Filled with luxurious gowns and lush grounds, Stephen Frears's Colette adaptation depicts an affair too perfect to last. Parisian courtesan Lea de Lonval (Michelle Pfeiffer) retains her good looks and has invested her earnings wisely, so her colleague, Madame Peloux (Kathy Bates), persuades Lea to celebrate the inception of her retirement by teaching the Madame’s self-centered son, Chéri (Rupert Friend, recalling T.Rex's tousle-haired Marc Bolan), how to treat a lady. Lea, who has known Chéri his entire life, has genuine affection for the unformed lad, although, as she quips, "I can't criticise his character, mainly because he doesn't seem to have one." To her surprise, their weekend in Normandy turns into a six-year-relationship. Then, Madame Peloux announces that she has found an appropriate 18-year-old bride for her now-reformed 25-year-old boy. Afraid to admit the depth of their feelings for each other, the duo grudgingly goes along with the plan since Belle Époque society demands that a proper gentleman marry a proper lady, and Lea realizes that matrimony to a man half her age isn't an option. But real love--even the co-dependent kind--can't be banished quite so easily as a bad habit. Frears and Oscar-winning screenwriter Christopher Hampton, adapting "Chéri" and "The Last of Chéri", previously collaborated with Pfeiffer on Dangerous Liaisons, but their reunion is a comparatively somber affair that comes recommended more for fans of the actress, who gives the role her all, than for fans of the filmmaker, whose direction feels perfunctory, particularly during the blink-and-you'll-miss-it epilogue. --Kathleen C. Fennessy, Amazon.com

Synopsis
Dangerous Liaisons Director Stephen Frears (The Queen, My Beautiful Laundrette) and screenwriter Christopher Hampton (Atonement, The Quiet American) reunite for this sumptuous period drama. Set against the backdrop of high society in pre-First World War Paris, Cheristars Michelle Pfeiffer (Scarface,Stardust) as Lea: a courtesan who has been having an illicit frisson with the Cheri (Rupert Friend - Pride and Prejudice and The Young Victoria), the son of her rival, Madame Peloux (Kathy Bates – Misery, About Schmidt). When Madame Peloux sets in motion a plan for Cheri to be married to the aristocratic Edmee (Felicity Jones – Brideshead Revisited), the couple soon realise how daunting a future could be without one another...

Customer Reviews

Costume Drama Fails The Mark.
For a change, I rented this out and watched it yesterday afternoon. Story is Lea (Michelle Pfeiffer) begins a six year affair with Cheri (Rupert Friend) only for his mother (Kathy Bates) to want him marrying a much younger woman. Lea lets him go but she soon realises that she has fallen for the man and he refuses to love his long-suffering wife. When the pair meet again, will they let their passion overrule everything? Sure, the costumes and settings are beautiful to look at and Pfeiffer was good in her role. You felt her pain and could easily see her character aging gracefully. The weakest out of the lot was Friend, he looks and acts like a woman. Why on earth did they chose him to be the love intrest? The chemisty between the two was bare, where was the passionate romance and the true dispair for the couple? I do love costume dramas that have a beautiful love story but here was non-existant. Like the other reviewer, I truely argee that this film was dull and the ending was the worst rushed one I have seen for something like this. Only recommened if you are a fan of either the stars but don't expect a tear-jerking romance, it's not here.

I found it unconvincing and dull
With female public figures such as Kim Cattrall, Tilda Swinton and Madonna being celebrated rather than denigrated for taking in toyboy lovers and given the huge popularity of costume dramas in recent decades, it's not difficult to imagine why an adaptation of Colette's 1920 and 1926 novellas was an attractive prospect for director Stephen Frears and writer Christopher Hampton. The Chéri novellas by Colette (1873-1954) detail the romantic entanglement of the 49 year-old Léa de Lonval (Michelle Pfeifer) with Fred 'Chéri' Peloux (Rupert Friend), who is 24 years her junior.

But Frears' version of Chéri is underwhelming. The camera seems more obsessed with the faces of Pfeifer and Friend than preoccupied with character or narrative development. The script is unconvincing at key moments: you don't believe that the decadent and petulent Chéri would actually buckle to maternal pressure to produce grandchildren at all. Nor that he would so suddenly be prepared to marry the anodyne Edmee (Felicity Jones) after a passionate, semi-Oedipal affair with the far more experienced Léa. Rupert Friend (The Young Victoria, Pride and Prejudice) is good on the arrogant petulence but tends to act with the same kind of restrained feeling as his girlfriend Keira Knightley, which prevents serious emotional and sympathetic involvement of the audience with the characters they are endeavouring to embody. Felicity Jones (Northanger Abbey, Brideshead Revisited) has a tendency to act self-consciously (I always feel conscious that she is acting rather than *being* the character) and it feels as though Pfeifer is going through the motions a bit here, perhaps a little bored or underchallenged in this environment. The Kathy Bates figure (she plays Chéri's mother) is more of a caricature than a character, as is true of some of the side characters, which is partly a fault of the script.

Costume dramas have become progressively less challenging and more homogenous and commercial since their heyday in the 1980s and mid-1990s when the 11-episode epic of Brideshead Revisited hit the TV screens (1981), the Pride & Prejudice miniseries starring Colin Firth and Jennifer Ehle aired (1995) and Carrington - directed by Chéri writer Christopher Hampton - debuted (1995). Nowadays dramas of the same genre try more often than not to seduce you more simply: through visual charms, an easily digestible romantic narrative, and diverse anachronisms (e.g. muscular bodies that can only be so sculpted by time spent lifting machine weights in a fitness studio). Keen to repay the multi-million pound investment that studios have put into such pictures and to find commercial success, directors know that audiences are receptive to accessibility and digestibility of this kind, but they will always leave some people in the audience, who might be hoping for a return to the golden days of period drama, wanting something more.

Really very good!
I was very pleasantly surprised by this film. Beautifully, sumptuously filmed, great acting from Michelle Pfeiffer (radiantly beautiful) and Rupert Friend, and a touching, involving story.

Thoroughly recommended.