04 December 2009
	CINEMA Paris in the Fall By Peter Wilhelm Frears and Hampton have produced a thinking man and woman's confection

I am perfectly aware that the movie of the season - which some have embraced as a pointer to the strange mood of contemporary America - is The Twilight Saga: New Moon. On its opening weekend in SA, New Moon venues were flooded with teens fully accessorised as vampires, in loving imitation of the film's characters, overpowering older cinemagoers in search of something a little less crimson. Michelle Pfeiffer Almost no-one appeared to want to see Chéri, a fine, if at times formulaic, recreation by Stephen Frears and his scriptwriter Christopher Hampton of the Paris of a century ago. They worked from the original books by the novelist Colette. Yes: courtesans and dangerous liaisons evoke a world long eclipsed. However, Chéri is markedly more suggestive of the real-life entanglements of men and women than New Moon's near-porn evocation of why a young male vampire will not induct his female, human love into his blood-sucking clan. (A self-denial which can obviously be read as sexual.) I must assume that my readers are neither vampires nor teenagers, but in the interests of transparency, this is what Dana Stevens - a reviewer for the online magazine Slate - confessed as her reaction to the film: "Sometimes a critic's aesthetic judgment is impossible to extricate from what you might call her cinematic libido... [The distinction] between what we're allowed to enjoy publicly and what we must sneak off to savour in private, has effaced itself to the degree that guilty pleasures' needs to be replaced by a more morally neutral term. "For our purposes here, I'll go with a term that a friend and I coined in college and that I still deploy on occasion: movies we couldn't intellectually defend but still unapologetically loved we called juicebombs'." Stevens goes on to hail New Moon as a juicebomb. I regret that that excludes me. And the thought that the Disney rival for the holiday season, Old Dogs, might offer an alternative was squelched by the discovery that the speedily tanking movie (starring two real old dogs, John Travolta and Robin Williams) has drawn the unkind comment that its protagonists should be "put to sleep". So I went to see Chéri. I'm glad. This then is a brief review of Chéri - in the tale the boy played by Rupert Friend is the son of a respected Belle Epoque grande horizontale amply embodied by Kathy Bates. There is an operatic touch to the treatment of Colette's novelettish material - a device which helps soothe what might have been a redundancy of period setting and character establishment. Though the film is about the lives and loves of courtesans, it also lets us know just enough of their social ambitions - not least for respectability when good looks falter - to redeem it as rather more than a dated piece of fluff. Part of the strategy lies in the script by Christopher Hampton. The author of Carrington and Dangerous Liaisons is well aware of the continually masked subjection of women, and the ruses employed to achieve and maintain power in the various worlds imposed on them. So it is here; though Hampton and Stephen Frears are hardly averse to the temptations of camp - perhaps a small price to pay for a meticulous excursion into not-quite-gay Paree. Chéri's delights lie mainly in performances by Michelle Pfeiffer and Kathy Bates: Pfeiffer is as always stunning; and her negotiations with Bates are marvellous. Both are retired serial mistresses (though Pfeiffer hardly looks ready for retirement), and the plot is essentially that of Bates asking Pfeiffer to take on young Friend - who delivers on mood - and train him in the ways of the world, a sentimental education. Chéri Directed by Stephen Frears Lead roles: Michelle Pfeiffer Rupert Friend Kathy Bates Felicity Jones Pfeiffer does so. Alas, she and Friend fall in love. Thus, when Bates steers her son into an auspicious marriage to a really young woman (Felicity Jones), the stage is prepared for some unwanted melodrama. This too is operatic - though the mood of joie de vivre holds. It can be recalled that two of Frears' most memorable recent films were Dirty Pretty Things and The Queen; he is at home in a huge variety of social and gender settings. It's also good to see Pfeiffer and Bates working together, rather than having been summarily dumped by the Hollywood machine. Clearly Frears and Hampton had fun working together again. With their leading ladies they have produced a thinking man and woman's confection - and, dare I say it, a juicebomb for non teens.