Michelle Pfeiffer crosses the finish line of Chéri as
a heartbroken, high-class prostitute in Belle Epoque Paris. She stares
balefully into the mirror, studying her crow’s-feet and the heartbreak
in her eyes—but it’s hard to muster much pity for her character,
who feels like a focus-group fabrication. It’s as if Hollywood execs
heard the word “cougar” on a talk show five years ago and have been
frantically scanning libraries ever since, looking for a classic story
that’d let them cash in on the zeitgeist. So now they’ve made their
cougar movie—and, they hope, cougar money—and Pfeiffer got
to dress up as the sexy beast one more time. All of which is well and
good, except nobody seems like they had a good time doing it. For all
its sex and high-society high jinks, Chéri lacks
iridescence and fire. It is a film built of rhinestones that plays this
adaptation of Colette’s two novels—Chéri and La
Fin de Chéri—as if they had been written by Jane
Austen in a dour mood.
The exception is Kathy Bates, who plays the Waspish mother of the
young romantic lead. Her old colleague and competitor (Pfeiffer) has
stolen the heart of her young, Byronesque son Chéri—but
Bates wants grandkids, damnit, so she shoves her son into an arranged
marriage. (Why the son agrees isn’t entirely clear.) Bates seems to
savor playing a sadistic old fussbudget, and she fills the screen with
her harrumphing figure: a cirrus of brown hair above, mountainous
bosoms below. Pfeiffer masks her sorrow and desperation beneath a thin
veneer of jaded nonchalance, the happy hooker who couldn’t be bothered
with a thing like love. Chéri (Rupert Friend) sways between
brooding and flip, his vapidity and fragility making him the most
counterfeit character of all.
In the end, the happy hooker turns out better than Chéri. In
Colette’s world, men are the weaker sex—but even cougars get the
blues. 
