A compaction of two Colette novels, written by Christopher Hampton and directed by Stephen Frears, about the grand amour between a brink-of-retirement Parisian courtesan and the androgynous bastard son of an already retired courtesan, the older woman (Michelle Pfeiffer) hitching her wagon to the younger man (Rupert Friend), who after six years together opts to uncouple and then recouple with a woman his own age, the bastard daughter of yet a third courtesan. The mismatch in ages (twenty-three years in real life) is so acutely felt as to give the occasional impression that the film is actually about something more than Belle Epoque clothes, décors, hairstyles, gardens, cars. The proper tone, however, is a struggle, the hardest labor coming from the arch omniscient narrator (director Frears himself), the lilting, mincing, never-letting-up music of Alexandre Desplat, and above all Michelle Pfeiffer, drawing out her vowels in an attempt to convey jadedness and sophistication and to keep pace in that regard with the predominantly British cast, short of doing a full-blown British accent. Kathy Bates, Felicity Jones, Frances Tomelty, Harriet Walter. (2009) — Duncan Shepherd
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