It is 1920s Paris, and Chéri has returned from the war to find that victory was the easy part. Now he must inhabit a life he never chose: husband to the ambitious Edmée, civilian again, ordinary. The young man who once lived beautifully off the courtesan Léa now walks the streets uncertain of who he is beneath the clothes. Colette maps the wreckage of post-war masculinity with her characteristic unflinching eye, tracing a marriage that exists in the space between expectation and despair. Chéri is adrift, caught between the ghost of who he was, the woman who owns him, and the nation that has no place for men who loved like he loved. This is not a love story, exactly. It is a study of what remains when the thing you were defined by dissolves into peace.
