Twenty-one years after getting in bed together for Dangerous Liaisons, the team of Michelle Pfeiffer, writer Christopher Hampton and director Stephen Frears reconvene for a spotty but sufficiently sprightly take on two novels by Colette.

Considering how starved any 51-year-old female star must be for material that doesn’t require her to play the mother of Miley Cyrus, it’s no surprise that Pfeiffer invests so much gusto into the role of Lea de Lonval, a renowned courtesan who — like the belle époque, the era of splendour she’s meant to epitomize — is nearing her best-before date. Her undoing comes at the pretty hands of the titular Chéri (Rupert Friend), the ne’er-do-well son of her colleague Madame Peloux (a perfectly cruel Kathy Bates). But when their years-long affair ends so that Chéri can marry a woman of a more appropriate age, both parties discover what becomes of the broken-hearted.

Conflating Colette’s 1920s best-sellers Chéri and The Last of Chéri, Hampton’s script is perhaps excessively brisk and efficient, such that the French writer’s cutting observations about the perishability of love and beauty are so hastily delivered, they barely leave a scratch. Frears also struggles to make Pfeiffer seem pitiable — moments like the one when Lea assesses her own arms as “beautiful handles for such an old vase” seem faintly absurd given how glamorous and gorgeous Pfeiffer remains. Chéri is her triumph all the same.