Hi!
Here I am, writing a short review of the film Chéri. It wasn't easy to find it after the italian release, because it was scheduled only in a few cinemas.
I've been completely satisfied by this adaptation, it is a beautiful, beautiful film!!
They respected the plot completely and took into account all the little decorative details that made the story unique and original and gave importance to the development of the characters' personalities. The characters were just perfect!!!
Michelle Pfeiffer was wonderful and brilliant, she gave to Léa her strong personality, her beauty, her motherly attitude and her frailty. I had a huge surprise with Rupert Friend, finding out he was just the perfect Chéri I had imagined reading the book. Perfect, both in beauty and in attitudes. He had the perfect looks, the perfect childish attitude, the charm and the weakness of a spoiled child. Felicity Jones played the part of Edmée and she surely was the right choice. After seeing her in Northanger Abbey she was perfect in the role of the little, unexperienced yet patient girl.
The scenography was beautiful and as I said for the book, everything seemed a XIX century's painting, with bright colours, a sweet and shallow atmosphere with a soft light and a quiet movement, yet, able to show us the dramatic and subtle experience of Léa, experiencing love and all the pain it carries, for the first time now that is a grown up bautiful woman, and the one of Chéri, immature young man unable to find his way without her motherly attentions. The director was particularly good in showing us she signs of this nostalgia and the time that flows: a beautiful decaying rose in the garden that Léa admires in a moment of desired loneliness, her beautiful eyes in a mirror which reveals to us the signs of the old age that is approaching. Léa, so intelligent, so superior to all that shallow gossip and that 'vanity fair' feels like she's falling into mediocrity, and not even her will be spared by the rules of the world.
The love story is not banal at all thanks to the particular personalities of the characters, it's painful and yet very sweet and passional. Colette with her small details of everyday life and odd conversations that occurs between people, creates for us a familiar atmosphere that seems still, unable to move toward the future.
I have only two critics to the choices made by the director:
1) Why using an omniscent narrator at the beginning and in the ending of the film? He probably added to the story the sensation of it being a 'tale', but I think it wasn't needed.. the images spoke for themselves, we didn't need a description of the characters' mind! And we're not at Colette's time, so a justification of events is not needed. I can see the narrator was useful in the very last scene, but then again,
2)Why even if the ending was perfect and just like Colette's Chéri's ending, the narrator felt the need to go on with the story and summarise in a sentence all 'The end of Chéri' (a following book in which the War arrives and the Belle Epoque is no more)? I thought the ending was perfectly dramatic and beautiful also without that.
Anyway, an intense, beautiful film, I'm completely satisfied.
The dvd is being released on 21 September here, on Amazon.co.uk and I'm surely going to buy it as soon as possible!! <3
Bye!
