A May-September love story

About 20 years ago, filmmaker Stephen Frears and screenwriter Christopher Hampton adapted the novel Dangerous Liaisons. From Choderos de Laclos' defining document of 18th-century French literature, they spun a movie that brilliantly contrasted the cynics, who play love as a sport, against the romantics, visibly elevated by the union of two souls.

Lightning does not strike again with Chéri. Frears and Hampton's version of Colette's heartrending novels - Chéri and The Return of Chéri - about a young man initiated by an older woman in the teens of the 20th century is surprisingly flat. The tale of the childless courtesan who, in her retirement, essentially adopts the fatherless 19-year-old son of a colleague succeeds in attractively framing the lovers' poses but not in conveying their inner transformation.

So accustomed are Léa (Michelle Pfeiffer) and Chéri (Rupert Friend) to regarding love as a business that they fail to see how it alters them. (This is not for lack of mirrors. Looking glasses - gilded, silvered, and beveled - line every salon and boudoir, reflecting social and sexual performance.) Their erotic adventures are depicted in the nature of French postcards.

Frears and Hampton (and their gifted collaborators) get a lot right. The sumptuous Belle Époque interiors are worthy of Manet, the shimmery gardens of Monet. You want to dive into the screen and slide your fingers across the silky upholstery and run barefoot through fragrant flower beds.

Pfeiffer, as the middle-aged minx, is ravishing, and Kathy Bates, as her onetime rival and Chéri's busybody mother, slyly funny. Friend is indolent and sleepy-eyed, with lips like ripe plums. The actors strike the correct notes, but the tone of the film is all over the place. As is the camera.

If you are not familiar with the source material, a May/September romance about the power and powerlessness of love, will you understand from this film that the seriocomic story is one of literature's great tragedies? I think not. On the page the narrator's tone is clearer than it is on-screen, where images dominate dialogue.

In the filmmakers' defense, the challenges of reproducing literature's nuances on screen are so immense that probably only two in 10 adaptations succeed. Still, Frears need only look at two of his own adaptations, Liaisons and High Fidelity, to understand what went wrong here. In those films, the lovers were kept in extreme closeup, all the better to see their romantic confusion. Here, Léa and Chéri are jewels hard to appreciate for all the fussiness of their overwrought settings.

Léa is a 19th-century sensualist who understands that in the 20th century, the rules of her game have changed. Chéri, the coddled child of his courtesan mother and, effectively, of his own courtesan lover, is a trophy rather than a man. He has a hard time adjusting to social shifts and expectations that he should be conventional. Unlike Colette's Gigi, about a girl who is raised to be a courtesan but weds an aristocrat, Chéri doesn't know how to defy expectations.

The film's brittle voice-over narration (by Frears himself) presents Léa and Chéri as a mismatched pair of debauchees done in by her age and his youth.

In the movie, Léa is a woman tired of catering to older men, happy to train a younger model to her own tastes; Chéri a sleeping beauty waiting for Princess Charmante to awaken him. What is lacking in this version, with its hasty third act and abrupt denouement, is the surprise that their union may be the deepest love either will ever know.