YOU KNOW you’re in trouble when the best jokes in a film come from the costumes. Stephen Frears’s supposedly witty tilt at the Belle Epoque is so stuffed with delicious images that viewers may feel themselves gagging on colour.

Every time Michelle Pfeiffer passes by one of the several thousand potted plants, she seems to change into an even more fabulous gown. When Kathy Bates, playing an aging battleaxe, emerges in a tangerine cocoon, the effect is hilarious. It is, however, a shame that no line of dialogue manages to raise quite so hearty a laugh.

Adapting a Collette novel, Frears has made a conspicuous attempt to summon up the magic of his 1988 hit Dangerous Liaisons. Once again Pfeiffer stars. Once again the subject is sexual chicanery among the French upper classes.

Pfeiffer plays an aging courtesan who takes Rupert Friend’s spoilt libertine as a lover. As the son of Bates’s retired prostitute, he understands the cynical rules of the game and allows himself to be pampered for six years. Then Mamma arranges his marriage to a rich teenager and everybody hurtles towards a nervous breakdown.

Pfeiffer overdoes the camp cooing and she doesn't look old in the right way, but she seems comfortable in her oddly taut skin. Friend appears to be the answer to the question: what would happen if Orlando Bloom could act a bit? Bates has fun in her own little panto. And those costumes are to die for, darling.

But the picture is as bland as last week’s croissants. And the posh characters are so ghastly! Within 10 minutes of the start, I found myself praying that a war would come along and blow them to smithereens. Which, actually, is what happened.

Directed by Stephen Frears Starring Michelle Pfeiffer, Rupert Friend, Kathy Bates, Felicity Jones 15A cert, lim release, 100 min