New Dangerous Liaisons

TrungT, Camera Press / Retna Director Stephen Frears talks to The Daily Beast’s Bryan Curtis about his new French period film, Chéri, reuniting with Michelle Pfeiffer, and how to make her look good on camera.

The music swells, the screen goes black, and a title card appears: “a Stephen Frears Film.” For another director, it would be a formality, but in the case of Frears it is a necessary reminder. Frears—whose films range to include everything from Dangerous Liaisons to High Fidelity, from My Beautiful Laundrette to The Queen—is a director who prefers to remain safely anonymous. He churns out smart movies while straining not to leave fingerprints. As Frears told me recently, summoning all his British reserve, “I vigorously protest any auteurial claims.”

“It’s all to do with her eyes,” Frears says of filming Pfeiffer. “You have to get it absolutely on the money. … Couple of inches off, it all goes.”

Since The Queen, the movie that sent a 1,000-watt surge of humanity through the British royals, anonymity has been rather difficult to maintain. And yet here comes a new film, Chéri, which is unlike anything Frears has done before. It has similarities to Dangerous Liaisons: It’s a French period piece starring Michelle Pfeiffer. But where the former was a sprawling melodrama, Chéri is a smallish character study. In Liaisons, Pfeiffer played a woman of virtue, pursued by the circling vulture Vicomte de Valmont. Here, Frears has stripped Pfeiffer of virtue and made her a prostitute.

Frears, who is 68, was in New York the other day attempting to undermine a writer who was celebrating his directorial genius, who sought Scorsese- and Tarantino-like passions within his movies. Did he have a fondness for Colette, author of the novel Chéri? “Not a flicker,” he said. This is typical Frears—he does not do “personal” films. “Other people's ideas are better than mine,” he added. Frears was unshaven and wearing baggy pants, a look Glenn Close once memorably dubbed “like the stadium after the game.” “He’s got his vanity like we all have, but he wears his success and his intellect very lightly,” said Giles Foster, a British director who has worked with Frears at the BBC. “There’s an English reticence to nail your name to the thing.”

So what does a Frears movie entail? Well, for starters, he is a writer’s director. “He insists that the writer is there at all times right through the shooting and the editing,” said Christopher Hampton, who wrote the screenplays for Chéri and Dangerous Liaisons. The writer is Frears’ guide to the cinematic world he has set out to create. In the case of Chéri, it took Frears and Hampton 21 script revisions to flesh out an alien, Belle Époque universe in which a few French courtesans became, for a glorious moment, “the most powerful women in the history of prostitution.”

Chéri’s heroine, Léa de Lonville (Pfeiffer), has made piles of money—just ask her footman. But the movie finds her at an age when her prospects are depreciating faster than an aging center fielder’s. Who’s left to ravish? She selects as her target Chéri (Rupert Friend), the 19-year-old son of another prostitute. Chéri’s quality time with prostitutes is not limited to his mother.

Photographing Pfeiffer, who is 51 and whose face still looks like marble, was a particular challenge. “What you're shooting is lifeless, then you put [the camera] in the right place and it comes together,” Frears said. “Because it's all to do with her eyes. You have to get it absolutely on the money.… Couple of inches off, it all goes.” As the shooting progressed, Hampton devised a scene in which Pfeiffer stares into the mirror. Those blue eyes look at her aged reflection in horror. You’re tempted to recall the final shot of Frears’ Dangerous Liaisons, in which Glenn Close gazed at her reflection and searched madly for a soul—but then that would be an auteurial claim.