Movie Review: Cheri

Only two noncommercial movie programs to report, one today and the usual Blank Page movie Tuesday. Today's program includes a movie, a cartoon, and a tour of the historic Scottish Rite Theatre at First and Topeka. The movie is the second of the National Treasure series, fully titled National Treasure: Book of Secrets, with Nicolas Cage as a treasure hunter, plus John Voight, Harvey Keitel, Ed Harris, Helen Mirren, and Randy Travis; there will also be a cartoon called "High and Dizzy," and a tour of the building. It's all at the Scottish Rite Temple, First and Topeka, with hot dogs and drinks, today at 3 and again at 6:30. And Tuesday, the Blank Page gallery offers popcorn and drinks and candy and Federico Fellini's Oscar-winning Nights of Cabiria, the source for the musical Sweet Charity, about an ever-hopeful prostitute and how badly life treats her but cannot crush her spirit, at 7:30 Tuesday in the Blank Page gallery, 917 West Douglas.

And commercially, Michelle Pfeiffer in Cheri, which I couldn't used last week because it was booked for only five days, is going into its third week, so I am happy to use it now, because Pfeiffer is electrifying as a fifty-year-old courtesan involved with a nineteen-year-old boy, to the only temporary happiness of both.

Based on a pair of novels by French writer Colette, Cheri, is almost slushily romantic despite a hard realism about December/May romances, with almost impossible lush settings in Paris restaurants you and I couldn't get a job in; houses so draped in tapestry that you can't tell what the walls look like; and gardens, indoors and out, like flowery jungles. And relations between Pfeiffer and Rupert Friend take place almost entirely in bedrooms, with Friend nude more than Pfeiffer, but nothing graphic either way. The biggest problem with Cheri, which may not bother audiences, is that the relationship is so limited to the bedroom that we never get to know Friend at all, and so what Pfeiffer sees in him is not very clear; I personally didn't like him at all, and it isn't the actor: all the acting in Cheri is first-rate, although you may find it a stretch to see Kathy Bates as an insanely rich ex-courtesan who was famous for digging gold out of her clients. She's a hilariously cynical old bat now, though some of her veteran colleagues are even less lovable and I would have liked to see more of her whole crowd.

But the big attraction of Cheri is Michelle Pfeiffer, back in a starring role and giving a performance Meryl Streep would be proud of. Director Stephen Frears likes closeups, sometimes long held closeups, and Pfeiffer can make facial changes from longing love to despairing loss without, so far as I could detect in two showings, so much as twitching a muscle. My only explanation is that somehow she is able to relax every muscle in her face about a sixteenth of an inch at will, and I'm sure that's physically impossible. The only other performance I can think of that mystified me this way was Lou Gossett Jr.'s in An Officer and a Gentleman, which won him an Academy Award in 1982.

Pfeiffer is by no means all that Cheri offers, but if she were it would be more than enough.