Review of Chéri — the film

Two of my favourite Colette novels, Chéri and La fin de Chéri, have been made into a sumptuous, lavish film. I couldn’t wait to see it! Colette wrote the novels — novellas, really — in the 1920s, but they are set in the dazzling, glorious days of La Belle Époque, circa 1900. Most of the story takes place, it hardly needs saying, in Paris.

Léa, a courtesan of “a certain age” takes Chéri as her last lover before retiring from the boudoir. To complicate matters, Chéri is the pampered 19-year-old son of Léa’s best friend and fellow courtesan, Madame Peloux (Kathy Bates).

Rupert Friend is perfect as the pretty, feminine boy for whom Léa is both mistress and mother. Michelle Pfeiffer is wonderful as Léa, but is too thin and pretty to embody the role. I’ve always imagined Léa as plump and bosomy, mature but still attractive — Helen Mirren, perhaps. The American accents were a jarring discord, and the lack of female body hair another jarring note, as well as being anachronistic. A woman in 1900 would no more have thought to shave her underarms than she would have thought of shaving her head.

The costumes and sets are gorgeous, and evoke the period’s love of beauty, extravagance and the exotic. Some of the story is set and filmed in Biarritz, one of my favourite places in France. Biarritz is a chic, elegant town in the Basque area (near the Spanish border) on the beautiful but rough Atlantic coast. Biarritz was the place to be if you were rich and gorgeous in the 1900s. My grandmother used to take me there for creamy hot chocolate and hot, salty buttered toast in a lovely, old-fashioned tea-room… what I would give to go there again!