During their idle moments or romantic longing, the filmmaker employs the flashback to show how both Cheri(Rupert Friend) and Lea(Michelle Pfeiffer) are never far from each other's minds. He's twenty-five; she's forty-nine, old enough to be, you know. A longtime friend/rival of his mother, Cheri knew the prostitute as "Nunu" before she became his lover. Relegated to the backstory, by omitting any dramatization of their former roles as adult and child, "Cheri" is complicit in its endorsement of this relationship, although the nickname the boy coined for Lea does at least acknowledge the momentous threshold that the old associates embarked on when their relationship turned from maternal to physical. An arranged marriage orchestrated by Cheri's mother(and Lea's one-time rival) Mme. Peloux(Kathy Bates), however, ends their six-year run, and on the boy's wedding day, the diegesis becomes a remembering one, as each lover conjures up the other at their most beautiful. Even in the world of courtesans, as in so-called polite society, Oedipal relationships are thwarted by too many factors that love simply can't overcome. But since the film makes judicious use of the flashback, the audience identifies with this impossible love. This adaptation of Colette's two semi-autobiographical novels "Cheri"(1920), and "Le fin de Cheri"(1926) sutures itself(Lea's flashbacks are always of Cheri as a man, not a boy), but the sutures aren't so foolproof that the love affair isn't up for a little critical scrutinization. The next time that Lea reminisces about Cheri, her idyllic abstraction of romance becomes flawed by a preceding flashback of another cross-generational couple whom she had met in Mme. Peloux's orchard. Described by her friend/rival as "the happy couple", Lea is confronted by a grotesque mirror of her own relationship with Cheri. The happy couple's disparate gap in age borders on sexual perversity, and projects a version of the original relationship that Lea had with Cheri during the boy's formative years. This mother/son dynamic, made discreet by Lea's ability to project a facade of timelessness, forces the well-maintained courtesan to reflect that her sex bomb years are finite and fast-approaching its expiration date. In her two-fold flashback, Cheri's bedroom eyes are staring back at not just his significant other, but a mother figure as well, to her dismay.
A wife in name only, Edmee(Felicity Jones) understands Cheri, the child of a whore, as she is one too, when the young girl concurs with his observance of retrospective hindsight that they were orphaned by their respective matriarchal libertines. With this admission, "Cheri" overstates its impetus for the self-described foundling's attraction towards Lea. But stripping Mme. Peloux's familial title so formally serves the specific function of recasting her in non-Oedipal terms. Since the complex that Sigmund Freud developed can't work without triangulation; can't work without the presence of a father(who could be any number of his mother's johns) to signify the mother he wants to f***. Dictated by heterogeneous rules that a subculture entails, Mme. Peloux acts against the nature of a parent when she hands over her son to a woman of motherly proportions who can't be trusted to act in a platonic capacity. She does son, in a vicarious sense where Lea can actualize all the physical fantasies that Peloux may harbor, but resist pursuing, due to the technicality of blood. Neither mother(in her son's estimation), nor lover, she has no tangible role in Cheri's life. The felicitous manner in which she dispenses information about the newlyweds' conjugality(she tauntingly remarks to Lea on the weather in Italy, site of her lover's honeymoon) seems derived from envy. Although the union was financially motivated, it doesn't seem to be the basis of Mme. Peloux's campaign to humiliate Lea, since no stern admonition against threatening the compounded wealth between the children of whores are never made. After six years of vicarious satiation by Lea's sexual exploits with her son, through the vehicle of disparaging rhetoric, she reminds the courtesan that she's aging and turns her son's lover back into a mother. Cheri knows it too. While Lea makes travel arrangements over the phone, the young man observes her through a crack in the door. Unaware of being monitored, the audience supplies their own flashback through Cheri's eyes, recalling scenes in which the boy saw her Lea's colleagues in restaurants and opium dens. They looked old.
A wife in name only, Edmee(Felicity Jones) understands Cheri, the child of a whore, as she is one too, when the young girl concurs with his observance of retrospective hindsight that they were orphaned by their respective matriarchal libertines. With this admission, "Cheri" overstates its impetus for the self-described foundling's attraction towards Lea. But stripping Mme. Peloux's familial title so formally serves the specific function of recasting her in non-Oedipal terms. Since the complex that Sigmund Freud developed can't work without triangulation; can't work without the presence of a father(who could be any number of his mother's johns) to signify the mother he wants to f***. Dictated by heterogeneous rules that a subculture entails, Mme. Peloux acts against the nature of a parent when she hands over her son to a woman of motherly proportions who can't be trusted to act in a platonic capacity. She does son, in a vicarious sense where Lea can actualize all the physical fantasies that Peloux may harbor, but resist pursuing, due to the technicality of blood. Neither mother(in her son's estimation), nor lover, she has no tangible role in Cheri's life. The felicitous manner in which she dispenses information about the newlyweds' conjugality(she tauntingly remarks to Lea on the weather in Italy, site of her lover's honeymoon) seems derived from envy. Although the union was financially motivated, it doesn't seem to be the basis of Mme. Peloux's campaign to humiliate Lea, since no stern admonition against threatening the compounded wealth between the children of whores are never made. After six years of vicarious satiation by Lea's sexual exploits with her son, through the vehicle of disparaging rhetoric, she reminds the courtesan that she's aging and turns her son's lover back into a mother. Cheri knows it too. While Lea makes travel arrangements over the phone, the young man observes her through a crack in the door. Unaware of being monitored, the audience supplies their own flashback through Cheri's eyes, recalling scenes in which the boy saw her Lea's colleagues in restaurants and opium dens. They looked old.