“In France Madame Colette is accepted as a national glory … In the English-speaking countries she is very little known, except to those who like reading French. A dozen or so of her books have been translated but so far as I know without creating much stir among either critics or the public. Must we conclude that she is one of those writers … whom it is impossible to export? …
“Her immense prestige comes indeed largely from the quality of her prose, which is rich, flawless, intricate, audacious, and utterly individual … All of which is a perpetual feast to the reader, a chronic headache to the translator.”
So writes Raymond Mortimer in his introduction to the 1951 translation of Colette’s novellas Chéri and The Last of Chéri, originally published in 1920 and 1926 respectively and now packaged in one volume. That makes sense because they both deal with the life of the young man nicknamed Chéri, before and after World War I, which splits the two stories. Together they make up what in the “English-speaking countries” would be considered proper novel-length. The movie Chéri takes almost all its storyline from the first novel, adding only the final paragraph of The Last of Chéri to close off the tale of this rather strange man.
Chéri means, roughly, “dearie”. It doesn’t have a final “e” because it is being applied to a masculine creature. Still, it is rather feminising, and Chéri is placed in the position of some women of his time: he’s beautiful, he’s spoilt, he’s passive. The endearment is perhaps intentionally infantilising, too, given that the two main figures with whom Chéri has to deal in this story are his mother, Mme Peloux, and her coeval, friend and rival Léa de Lonval.
Both those ladies are retired courtesans, women who were in an earlier age called les grandes cocottes, the great harlots — women who made their fortunes by having affairs with rich men. Like Madame de Pompadour centuries earlier, they basically specialised in being mistresses, not wives. As important to them as their beauty (which Léa has kept and Mme Peloux has not) is their financial sense, their ability to attract the right men and make a decent amount of money out of them before they, or the men, move on to fresh conquests.
Having retired from the hurly-burly of active service, these women (particularly Mme Peloux) have assumed the accoutrements of bourgeois respectability — and some of the attendant morals. They have basically spent their lives being expensive prostitutes so that by middle age they can achieve a solid middle-class life. It’s all about investments and returns now. This irony permeates the story of Chéri, though it’s not always brought into focus in the film.
It is worth setting the scene in some detail, because for many viewers Chéri will seem a portrait of an unfamiliar world with rules that are unclear, which means that the progression of the drama in the film can be puzzling. It’s as though the filmmakers, too, became aware of this at some point, because the movie has been given an introduction and a voiceover to try to explain itself, which only partly works.
We are given a reasonably clear sense of the older women, at least. Kathy Bates, as Mme Peloux, gives a marvellous impression of the woman’s bustling hypocrisy and willingness to manipulate others as it suits her and her financial schemes. Contrasted against her is Léa (a lissome but depthless Michelle Pfeiffer), ageing but still beautiful, someone who considers herself hors de combat. But she will be surprised.
In fact, she will be surprised by Chéri himself, and by what Chéri’s presence in her life will come to mean. For Mme Peloux’s son, about 19 as the tale begins, is quite happy to flirt with mom’s good friend, someone he regards as a “doting godmother”, and then to embark on an affair with her.
If Mme Peloux thought she was letting her son get a little éducation sentimentale, and if Léa de Lonval thought a flirtation with a 19-year-old would be a summer divertissement and no more, and if Chéri thought he’d show une femme d’une certain age a good time for a bit … Well, they are all going to be taken aback by what transpires. Or, in the case of Chéri himself, perhaps not: it’s hard to know how Chéri really feels about this.
Oddly, Chéri is the most opaque character in the story. He’s there all the time, but he’s an absent centre. In the movie, you can blame this on the poor or undeveloped acting skills of Rupert Friend, who plays the young man. Friend is personable and is very good at getting his shirt off, as well as pursing his little mouth petulantly, but he’s not very good at transmitting what Chéri is supposed to be feeling, or indeed at making Chéri much of an interesting person at all.
You can blame, too, if necessary, Christopher Hampton’s script and/or Stephen Frears’s direction. But Chéri’s rather like that in the book, too. Even when we’re being told by Colette how he’s feeling and what he’s thinking, he seems hard to get. Perhaps she wanted to tell the story of a hollow man, hence some use of others’ perspectives, but he remains rather vacant.
Whatever the case, one can certainly blame Hampton and Frears for cleaving too closely to the book. Perhaps they felt they had to, this being (or once having been) a famous book, but these are also the people who adapted Les Liaisons Dangereuses so magnificently, for heaven’s sake! I thought the dialogue in Chéri was incredibly stilted when I saw the film; reading the book, afterwards, I saw that much of it comes straight from Colette’s text. And that, in turn, may have been badly translated (it reads very creakily), or perhaps Colette is just untranslatable, as Mortimer suggested in 1951.
Admittedly, the atmosphere of that time and place, and the role of these particular people, is hard to put across without a whole lot of cumbersome context, but surely Hampton and Frears could have found some way to show both the exoticism (to many Anglophones in the 21st century) of this unusual moral microclimate, as well as to demonstrate to us its continuity with today’s obsession with money and status?
As it stands, it’s difficult to make sense of it as a whole, despite the intriguing storyline. Perhaps they should have left Chéri in French, and left it to French actors and a French director to embody this odd French story. Quel dommage.