Kirpianuscus charming for actors more than for story. trip around a world like an ice cream. love and interests and humor and relations and secrets and seduction as refined art. short, a nice adaptation, provocative for the flavor of an universe who seems be part of Dangerous Liaisons, wise lesson about science to explore detail and an impressive cast doing its the best. and, sure, Michelle Pffeifer. in a role who seems be her perfect tool for translate emotions and shadows of an age and impossibility of the right option.

David Traversa Aging, Michelle Pfeiffer has become what Oscar Wilde called "That abomination of nature: A Handsome Woman". Her very trimmed figure looks spectacular sheathed in very glamorous Belle Epoque dresses and looking at her with contemporary eyes, that's fine.What the director forgot in recreating so beautifully, so painfully all the paraphernalia necessary to reproduce that magnificent time in history was... the ideal of feminine beauty at the time.We glaringly see it in the same old pictures (authentic) shown at the start of the movie, pictures of the great beauties then, like Lillie Langtry, Lia de Putti, la Bella Otero, etc. and it's obvious that those beauties where more on the side of Marilyn Monroe than Michelle Pfeiffer, who looks like a window display mannequin with no curves in the right places and no minimal waistline (Hourglass figure painfully obtained thanks to an oppressing corset, but there it was).To give us total recall of that time our protagonist should have been somebody a bit fatter than Ms. Pfeiffer, since we readily forget all the changes the feminine figure has suffered just in the last 100 years; what was considered fashionable or desirable then was quite different from now, and a thin woman was totally undesirable.The film is nice, in a very superficial way, since its main flaw is irreparable, because speaking English in this superbly French story, we get a jarring note, and it's this: All the "decadent" morality, social behavior, points of view about richly kept elegant cocottes by the upper class French men is something totally unknown to puritan Victorian English society. This utterly French "Menage a Trois" is totally lost in this English version of Paris life at the turn of the century.The house where she lives, the street, the interior locations, the dresses, all that is perfectly fine (more than fine, exquisite), but THE ESENCE of Colette masterpiece is not there. Due to the strong visual appeal in interiors, color schemes, Art Nuveau architecture and Belle Epoque fashions, this is mainly eye candy for dress designers and interior decorators.

sjb_can While I thought the idea of the movie interesting--a May/December romance with Lea, played by Michelle Pfeiffer, being much older--it was distasteful that Michelle's character was like an aunt to the nineteen-year-old Cheri, played by Rupert Friend. There was a hint that Cheri's mother, Kathy Bates (who I always love), wanted the affair to occur to keep Cheri out of trouble. That seemed a bit creepy. As for the romance, there was no chemistry between Lea and Cheri, and no character development for Cheri, even though the movie was named for him. He remained sullen, brooding, immature and amazingly dull, although I don't blame Rupert Friend for the performance. I think the script, direction and editing were to blame, if not the story itself. The love scenes were tasteful but not believable. The pair were together for six years, but the relationship didn't seem to have love or even lust at its core, just a boredom being filled with champagne and satin sheets. Michelle was the reason my rating was a 3 rather than a 1. She did a good job with what she had to work with and I was invested in her character. However, the character was ultimately a disappointment. I think we were supposed to come away with an experience of a slice of French culture (courtesans) during La Belle Epoque, but it didn't work. I was stunned to see a car pull up to a country house; it seemed out of place. The director had no idea how to set the time and place properly. The overlong verbal narration at the beginning and end of the movie was not only annoying (I hate being told what should be shown) but it didn't tell us things helpful to the story. The voice-over at the end was particularly awful because Cheri's entire life's arc was given three sentences. If they had edited that out, I may have been able to nudge my rating to a 5.

gradyharp Stephen Frears has created some powerful and very well crafted movies: 'Dangerous Liaisons', 'My Beautiful Laundrette', 'The Grifters', 'The Queen', 'Prick up your Ears', 'Dirty Pretty Things', etc. One would expect that his experience in dealing with edgy issues would make him the perfect choice for adapting the famous French writer of 'naughty novels' - Colette - but somewhere in the flow of this production, perhaps in the Christopher Hampton's adaptation of the novel to screenplay, the original stories become perfumed and sanitized. And the reasons why this happened remain obscure. The story is simple: courtesans in Paris must eventually retire form their lives of becoming wealthy through pleasing men of the higher class, and either they live out their lives in the luxuries of fluff or they must confront their aging and feel pangs of remorse as they end their lives alone, without a man to bolster them. Lea de Lonval (Michelle Pfeiffer) has been longtime 'friends' with Madame Peloux (Kathy Bates), even to the point of nurturing Madame's son Chéri (Rupert Friend) as he approaches manhood. Madame asks Lea to 'polish' Chéri for other women and after what might have been a brief fling in Normandy, the young Chéri and the aging Lea fall into a six year relationship. But as Madame realizes she needs grandchildren, she eventually finds a proper girl Edmee (Felicity Jones) for Chéri to marry. The remainder of the story is how these two age-disparate characters adapt to the 'social rules' of La Belle Epoque, suggesting that even under extraordinary circumstances the power of love is an issue that must be confronted. Despite the performances by Pfeiffer and Friend (and even the miscast Bates) the story feels somehow sterile. Perhaps it is the out of place use of a male narrator who gives the film an unnecessary feeling of being a documentary, or the somewhat overused musical score of Alexandre Desplat, or the emphasis on costumes that hardly add to the beauty of Pfeiffer as Lea that keep the production grounded. It is a pleasant enough film, but hardly a memorable one. Grady Harp