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.