and make presumptions about them all. It's just too bad her new movie doesn't have more juice. 'Cheri,' based on twin novellas by Colette, reunites Pfeiffer with Stephen Frears, the wily, irascible director of their previous collaboration, 'Dangerous Liaisons' (1988), a movie that also found something in antique situations about modern hypocrisy and amorality. As 'Cheri's' uncredited narrator, Frears uses the film's first few moments to set up its conceit: Imagine a world, he says, in which people who prostituted themselves weren't automatically successful. As indicated, Frears has some issues with the frivolity of contemporary culture (not surprising for a filmmaker schooled in the social consciousness of the '70s BBC). His perspectives do inform and enlighten 'Cheri,' which has a screenplay by Christopher Hampton ('Atonement') and, as previously indicated, an abundance of clothes and hats. But while 'Cheri' may be eye candy for the couture crowd, it's also a lament for the demise of conformity. What else, after all, gives nonconformists any traction? How can you be a rebel, an upstart, when nonconformity is a fashion accessory? It wasn't 100 years ago, when (according to Colette, at least) a subculture of 'courtesans' achieved prototypical notoriety/celebrity. Among the A-listers is Lea (Pfeiffer), a famed Parisian, well schooled in pleasure and the politics of the personal, who is approaching that point when she will age out of her profession. (Any parallels to Hollywood are, no doubt, intentional.) With friend and colleague Madame Peloux (a terrific Kathy Bates), Lea wends her way through Hampton's insouciant banter with decadent assurance and an eye on the clock -- which is why she adopts as her project, and her lover, Cheri (Rupert Friend), Madame Peloux's son and a candidate for early debauchery. ('I can't criticize his character,' his own mother says, 'since he doesn't seem to have one.') What begins as a lark turns into love. And what began as a frothy period piece becomes a meditation on the tyranny of the so-called normal. 'Cheri' is set at a time when to ignore society was to incur something other than good publicity. In other words, it cost to defy convention. And the acknowledgment of that cost keeps 'Cheri' from floating away on a cloud of crepe de Chine. But for all its craft, and Frears's tart sense of humor, 'Cheri' suffers from being about feelings rather than story. Cheri, proving that even a sub-rosa society has its regulations, will marry the young, innocent Edmee (Felicity Jones) at his mother's insistence, making his young wife suffer in her marriage while he and Lea suffer in their separation. All around them, Frears finds ways of reflecting in people and situations the way the couple fear that outsiders see them -- as ridiculous, pathetic or doomed. As a technique, it can be haunting. 'Cheri' also looks terrific, if a bit gauzy at times, and Frears is never at rest. Still, the movie bogs down by going nowhere other than inside its characters. They may be intensely passionate, but as a more contemporary romance might put it, the question remains whether the problems of three little people amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world. Or that one. -- 'Cheri' (100 minutes) is rated R for sexual content and drug content. 