Michelle Pfeiffer: Ages gracefully with her new film

Michelle Pfeiffer: Ages gracefully with her new film

It is time to admit that Michelle Pfeiffer is a great actress! She turned 50 on the sets of her new film 'Cheri'. So now we should stop holding her looks and her way of speaking (plain, middle class American) against her and just focus on her capabilities.

"Cheri" finds the actress at the height of her ability, in a role worthy of her maturity and emotional intelligence. Since "Married to the Mob" in 1988, Pfeiffer has been chalking up a series of rich performances, full of intuition, subtlety and psychological insight.

Pfeiffer has the capacity to play someone in the midst of turmoil who knows she cannot allow others to read what she's feeling - yet she shows those feelings to us.

"Cheri" is based on a pair of novels by Colette and set in pre- World War I France. It tells the story of the professional siren Lea de Lonval, (played by Pfeiffer) a courtesan who is towards the end of a successful and lucrative career, spending decades working within the constraints of public ritual. She's a master of self-presentation who is flawless in her style and dress and knows never to show a sign of weakness. She unexpectedly falls in love with a much younger, slightly vapid, but a handsome, brooding young man played by Rupert Friend.

It's the tale of a refined cougar written about 90 years before cougardom entered the cultural lexicon, and the new film pairs Pfeiffer again with her "Dangerous Liaisons" director Frears and screenwriter Christopher Hampton.

A refreshing aspect of "Cheri" is that Pfeiffer actually plays her own age. Here "older woman" is not defined as 35 but as somewhere around 50. This film shows us the strains and challenges of an older woman-younger man relationship.  As Friend is coming into his manhood, she is transitioning out of young womanhood into another phase of life.

Pfeiffer with her long years of experience, brings the hard-earned wisdom and self-knowledge to Lea. What she glosses over is the utter pathos she brings to the scene, that of a beautiful woman staring into the abyss of age and loneliness. Friend too has very skillfully played the role of a young man in no position to know his own heart, as he doesn't know himself.