Set in the luxurious demi-monde of pre-First World War Paris, CHÉRI is the story of the love affair between the beautiful retired courtesan Léa (Michelle Pfeiffer) and Chéri (Rupert Friend), the son of her old colleague and rival, Mme Peloux (Kathy Bates).
Léa has educated the spoilt and callow boy in the ways of love, but after six years Mme Peloux has secretly arranged a marriage between Chéri and Edmée (Felicity Jones), daughter of another rich courtesan, Marie Laure (Iben Hjejle).
As the inevitable moment of parting approaches, Léa and Chéri try to come to terms with their imminent separation, but the roots of their life of ease and pleasure reach deeper than even they imagine and they begin to understand, too late, how much they mean to one another.

Bringing the story to the big screen
Christopher Hampton, the Academy Award-winning screenwriter behind Dangerous Liaisons, was developing a screenplay about the renowned French author Colette (1873-1954) when he began adapting her most famous novel Chéri. Written in 1920, it told the story of the doomed love affair between Léa de Lonval, one of the most celebrated courtesans of the day, and Chéri, the young son of an old colleague and rival.
"Colette has always been one of my favourite writers and I got very interested in doing the Colette life story because she had a tyranical older husband and ran away to become a striptease artiste," says Hampton. "Colette is loved and admired because she writes in a very individual and personal way and writes very sensitively about women. With some writers you don't need to research much but Colette was fascinating and it was a pleasure to read her other works."
It was the love story theme of Chéri that proved such a irresistible attraction for Hampton. "It's a story of two people who have no idea that they're in love with each other," he says of the film's protagonists. "Léa thinks she'll educate this younger boy and then pass him on a wiser man, and Chéri thinks he's landed on his feet with a beautiful woman taking care of him until it's time for him to move on. They know there's an end point to their relationship. But when it arrives they both realise that they will miss each other very badly. A rather heroic act by Léa liberates Chéri and lets him go but at great cost to herself. You suspect he won't recover too well either."
Of course, the early 1900s milieu in which the story is set was another draw for the writer. "This is a fascinating world, this demi-monde, which at the end of 19th century reached its peak but was approaching its decline at time of the story in 1906," says Hampton. "This was a corner of society, the courtesans, who had amassed spectacular wealth. They had to stick together because they were shunned from the rest of society but they had very interesting lives, they were very cultivated and they were unlike any contemporary group you can think of. There was something very modern about this group in one respect because they were emancipated women."
Although translating from the original French afforded Hampton a certain freedom in being able to pick and chose from the dialogue in the novel, the fact that it isn't a conventional narrative posed a more taxing creative challenge. "Colette's an impressionist, there are little bursts of dialogue or imagery," he explains. "She can spend 20 pages on one scene but three months can fly by in a paragraph. At the start I found I had a first draft that was longer than the novel itself! So I had to ruthlessly prune."
After various false starts, Hampton discovered that Bill Kenwright, top UK theatre impresario, had optioned the rights, just as Kenwright himself was about to approach Hampton to tackle his long-gestating screen adaptation.
"Christopher Hampton was my first choice to adapt the novel," says Kenwright. "His first draft was wonderful but it was a real battle to get it onto the screen because it's a costume drama, because it's such a simple, focused story, because it's so tragic and I would have thought mostly because the world of the Courtesan is probably not one that contemporary audiences know a lot about."
It was Stephen Frears' involvement that finally brought the project together at the end of 2007. The director was riding high thanks to The Queen which not only won lead Helen Mirren an Academy Award for Best Actress but also became a worldwide hit for Miramax. He was approached by Kenwright and agreed to come on board within 24 hours of reading the screenplay.
Frears was attracted to the project partly because of Hampton's evocative screenplay but also because it was a chance to explore an era some 100 years removed from The Queen.
"Christopher's script was wonderful and Colette is a brilliant writer and the story seemed very fresh to me," says the director. "It's so beautiful, so old-fashioned and so frivolous and yet also so melancholic and tragic, and at the same time very clever. That's because Colette was such a clever writer. She's an impressionist. The story is a series of impressions and making them all add up into something is the challenge. It's the most extreme film I've ever made and the most original story about people living in a bubble. These women were very powerful and had a lot of influence, but they lived in an enclosed society which was cut off from the mainstream. And as Lea tells Madame Peloux, they have to make friends within the profession because no one else understands them. And, of course, they're also acutely aware of what happens to them when they age and lose their beauty."
For a director who says he finds making films "very difficult", he won the admiration of the whole cast and crew. Says Hampton: "I like working with him very much. I soon learnt that it was very unusual for a director to have the writer there - it's too dangerous to have a boring pedant there all the time picking holes in what's going on - but Stephen's different. There's an enormous depth and generosity to his collaborativeness. He has a very subtle approach when a scene isn't working, when a scene is too long, or something doesn't work. I've learned to trust those instincts. It's often to do with words but also to do with concision and often to do with mood, finding a pause that will complete the music of the scene. In that sense, he's very intuitive."
Frears also lived up to all Bill Kenwright's expectations. "I was huge fan of Stephen's - two of my favourite films are The Grifters and Hi-Lo Country - and it was a thrill to work with him. You're blessed when you find someone like Stephen; I knew he could make the film work. And he's great with the actors; he does a lot of takes, to get the actors' juices going. He knew exactly what he wanted and how the film should look from very early on. He was very painstaking and focused and was meticulous about the mood of the film. Really, he's a master."
With Frears at the helm, Kenwright was able to secure backing from two key partners, Pathe and Miramax Films. But the key to making the film succeed was finding the right actors for the roles of Léa de Lonval and Chéri.

CASTING THE FILM
Casting the character of Léa proved a unique challenge. The filmmakers knew there were few actresses who had the qualities they were looking for as a woman in her 40s who was naturally beautiful and sensually charismatic. One name, however, was the perfect fit and she had already worked with Frears and Hampton - Michelle Pfeiffer, whose haunting performance in Dangerous Liaisons won her her first Academy Award nomination in 1989 and had recently returned to the spotlight with acclaimed turns in Stardust and Hairspray.  Read more

RECREATING THE PERIOD
One of the most generous directors when it comes to collaborating with his creative heads of department, Stephen Frears insists he relies entirely on his cinematographer and production and costume designers for how the film will look. Those who worked with him, however, know just how crucial his input was in the making of CHÉRI. Says composer Alexandre Desplat: "He says he knows nothing about the music or the design? He's lying! Stephen has a great intuition of what the movie is aiming for and he knows exactly what will work when they're put together. With the music, for example, he doesn't ask me to change this chord or that note, but he says make it nastier or wilder or give it more wit. And he's very involved."Read more

THE COURTESANS ~ A BRIEF GUIDE
Known as the grandes horizontales, courtesans in late 19^th century Paris were the height of fashion.
Renowned throughout the world for their beauty, wit, conversation and skill, these demi-mondaines were at the centre of Parisian social and political life, entertaining the most powerful men in government, royalty and the arts, but remaining cut off from the mainstream in an exclusive closed-off world.
They influenced fashion, lived ostentatious life styles that showed off the wealth of their lovers and were hotly in demand among the richest of Europe's aristocracy who would compete to enjoy their favours.
Of course, those favours did not come cheap and the most famous courtesans amassed vast wealth through sensible investments and judicious acqusitions of property and assets. Personality and beauty were their only commodities and the shrewdest knew that their status would only last as long as their looks.
Among the most famous courtesans of the time were Apollonie Sabatier whose salon welcomed intellectuals such as Baudelaire and Flaubert, Marie Duplessis who was immortalised in Alexandre Dumas fils play La Dame Aux Camélias, Esther Pauline Lachmann who became known as La Paiva and married Count Henckel von Donnersmark, and English-born Cora Pearl whose lovers included Prince Napoleon.

ABOUT THE CREW

STEPHEN FREARS Director
Stephen Frears is one of the UK's most critically-acclaimed directors who has worked with some of the UK's best talent both in front of and behind the cameras. His most recent triumph was The Queen (2006) which won Helen Mirren a Best Actress Academy Award and for which Frears was nominated for numerous directing awards around the world including an Academy Award, BAFTA and Golden Globe. The film also became a box office hit after its launch at the Venice International Film Festival.
Frears began his career at London's Royal Court Theatre, where he worked with director Lindsay Anderson, and moved into the film industry in 1966 as an assistant director to Karel Reisz. He made his directorial debut with Gumshoe (1971), a wry homage to film noir starring Albert Finney. After several acclaimed television productions and the cult feature film The Hit (1984) which starred John Hurt and Tim Roth, his breakthrough came in 1985 with My Beautiful Laundrette which launched the careers of Daniel Day-Lewis and writer Hanif Kureishi who was nominated for Best Original Screenplay Academy Award. Frears and Kureishi reteamed on Sammy and Rosie Get Laid (1987) which like My Beautiful Laundrette looked at many of the issues that characterised Britain in the 1980s.
Frears went on to direct Prick Up Your Ears (1987) about English playwright Joe Orton, starring Gary Oldman and Alfred Molina, and then made Dangerous Liaisons written by Christopher Hampton and starring Michelle Pfeiffer, John Malkovich and Glenn Close. An adaptation of Choderlos de Laclos' caustic Les Liaisons Dangereuses the film triumphed at the Academy Awards in 1989 winning Best Adapted Screenplay Academy Award, Best Costumes and Best Art Direction, as well as nominations for Best Actress for Close,  Best Supporting Actress for Pfeiffer, Best Picture and Best Music.
Frears was again nominated for an Academy Award for Best Director the following year for The Grifters (1990) which starred John Cusack, Anjelica Huston and Annette Bening. He then made Hero (1992) starring Dustin Hoffman and Geena Davis, Mary Reilly (1996) starring Julia Roberts and John Malkovich and two low-budget adaptations of novels by Roddy Doyle, The Snapper (1993) and The Van (1996). Then came The Hi-Lo Country (1998) starring Woody Harrelson, Billy Crudup, Penélope Cruz and Patricia Arquette, and the acclaimed High Fidelity (2000) based on Nick Hornby's popular novel and starring John Cusack, Jack Black and Iben Hjejle.
He returned to the small screen in 2000 with Fail Safe starring George Clooney and Harvey Keitel, and directed Liam in the same year. In 2002, his drama-thriller Dirty Pretty Things was an arthouse and festival hit and launched the career of Chiwetel Ejiofor as well as earning an Academy Award nomination for Best Original Screenplay. The political drama The Deal, which Frears made for Channel 4 in 2003, paved the way for The Queen, and he followed that in 2005 with the historical drama Mrs Henderson Presents which starred Judi Dench and Bob Hoskins.

CHRISTOPHER HAMPTON Screenwriter
One of the UK's most esteemed contemporary playwrights, Christopher Hampton is perhaps best known in film for his Academy Award-winning screenplay for the hit film Dangerous Liaisons (1988). Hampton adapted this from his own play and marked his first collaboration with Stephen Frears and Michelle Pfeiffer. His screenplay for Atonement, adapted from Ian McEwan's acclaimed novel and directed by Joe Wright, Atonement starred Keira Knightley and James McAvoy and became a box office hit in 2007. It was nominated for a slew of Academy Awards including Best Picture, Best Supporting Actress for newcomer Saoirse Ronan and Best Adapted Screenplay for Hampton himself and won the Academy Award for Best Music.
Hampton began his career in the theatre and one of his first hits was When Did You Last See My Mother at London's Royal Court Theater in 1966 when he was just 20 years old. During his residency at the Royal Court he adapted classic literature for the stage and wrote original plays including Total Eclipse about the relationship between the poets Rimbaud and Verlaine, The Philanthropist (1970), Savages (1973) and Treats (1976). His stage adaptation of Choderlos de Laclos' Les Liaisons Dangereuses brought him international acclaim.
He made his feature debut with the screenplay for Ibsen's A Doll's House (1973) and went on to write a number of films and TV dramas including The History Man (1981), The Honorary Consul (1983) and Hotel Du Lac (1986). A sojourn in Los Angeles inspired the 1980 stage hit Tales From Hollywood about European exiles working in the American film business which he later adapted for BBC Television.
He made his film directing debut with Carrington (1995) starring Emma Thompson and Jonathan Pryce which he also wrote, and went on to direct The Secret Agent (1986) and Imagining Argentina (2003). His screenwriting credits also include the film version of Total Eclipse (1995), Mary Reilly (1996), which marked his second collaboration with Stephen Frears, and The Quiet American (2002) for director Philip Noyce.
Hampton's stage work also includes the critical and commercial hit Art (1996) which he translated from the play by Yasmine Reza, and the libretto for Andrew Lloyd Webber's stage adaptation of Billy Wilder's Sunset Boulevard, which won two Tony Awards in 1995.

THE ART OF ADAPTATION

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