Chéri (2009)

Stephen Frears: Narrator

Photos 

Quotes 

• [last lines] 

  Narrator : He was unable to suppress a sense that he had been able to escape from something. That he was a free man again. A feeling he eventually came to realize was entirely misguided. It was many years before he understood that both of them had been quite unjustly punished. Léa for being born so many years before him, and Chéri for having failed to grasp that Léa was the only woman he would ever be able to love. And once he was settled in his mind that this was the case, he took out his old service revolver, and put a bullet in his brain.

• [first lines] 

  Narrator : We may think ourselves familiar in this day and age with the notion that whores of every description can very easily achieve fame and fortune. But towards the end of the 19th century, there what came to be known in France as the "Belle Epoque", a select group of courtesans, who became for a short period, the most celebrated and powerful women in the long history of prostitution.