The Talkies/Tales From the City

...Com-pared with the busy, self-conscious camera movements of the previous seg-ments—Scorsese's nervous and jerky, Coppola's fluid and operatic—Allen's static camera communicates a satisfy-ing sense of confidence in his story and characters, a heartening reluctance to rely too much on cinematographic athletics to captivate his audience...

...Most of the support-ing actors, moreover, are far more con-vincing than the principals...

...Directed by Stephen Frears from a screenplay by Hampton and entitled Dangerous Liaisons, the movie version of Hampton's play represents some-thing of an improvement on these counts...

...To be sure, Allen, like his collaborators, has made use of a New York cliché—in this case, the overly possessive Jewish mamma—but unlike them he recognizes it as a cliché and makes fun of it...

...But Malkovich is awful: his delivery, his body language, everything down to the way he drops his two front teeth over his lower lip when he closes his mouth, says Off-Off-Broadway...

...Glenn Close, a wonderful actress, fakes her way through her part creditably enough...

...about the proliferation in their dialogue of mediocre Oscar Wilde-ish epigrams and childishly smutty double-entendres...

...the only one of the film's three segments that veers into out-and-out fantasy—and yet, at the same time, it's the only one that's in touch with the rhythms of real New York life, the on-ly one that reflects a sincere affection for the city, the only one whose pro-tagonist we can believe in and sym-pathize with...

...and Philippe Rousselot's elegant cinematography makes it emi-nently watchable...

...While Dangerous Liaisons may not quite equal the sum of its best parts, then, there are some very fine parts here indeed...

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...If Malkovich is the last actor you'd cast as Valmont, Frears—whose work is almost relentlessly preoccupied with the new, the Now—would seem to be the last director you'd hire to shoot a movie like this...

...Patently, the part calls for someone with great surface charm and attractiveness (it's the kind of role George Sanders used to play), but Mal-kovich is about as far as you can get, in the Screen Actors Guild directory, from charm and attractiveness, surface or otherwise...

...L es Liaisons Dangereuses, the 1782 novel by the French writer Choderos de Laclos, tells the story of a pair of corrupt sophisticates, the Marquise de Merteuil and the Vicomte SARKES TARZIAN INC WRCB...

...The answer, I sus-pect, can be given in two words: Stephen Frears...

...First, the symbol-ridden set is gone, replaced by palatial location set-tings that are rendered in thoroughly realistic fashion...

...This is not to suggest that the director of Annie Hall and Hannah and Her Sisters is in top form here...

...Though the film ultimately affirms the value of love and the destructiveness of vanity, there are times along the way when it appears to celebrate the Mar-quise's betrayals and the Vicomte's depredations, and to laugh at Chris-tianity, at the ideal of chastity, and (for that matter) at the eighteenth century...

...Indeed, in tone and rhythm and spirit the movie seems much nearer to Choderos de Laclos's stately, probing, and sardonic 200-year-old novel—with its fundamen-tally serious interest in the nature of love and evil—than to Hampton's own cheap and frivolous play...

...Fourth, since most of the roles are here acted in a less stagy and stylized manner than in the play, and since the camera brings us close enough to see the characters thinking and experiencing and express-ing emotion, there is less of a sitcomish feel to the proceedings than there was at the Music Box Theater...

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...If his segment of New York Stories proves anything, indeed, it's that even his less ambitious, more offhand work can be quite entertaining—which is, alas, more than one can say for Scorsese or Coppola...

...These weaknesses are not entirely absent from Dangerous Liaisons...

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...and about the heavy-handed symbolism of the set, which in one way and another sought to remind us that the days of the pre-Revolutionary French society depicted in the play were numbered...

...But the movie has its own grave problems, one of them being that the two principal actors—Glenn Close and John Malkovich—are among the most decidedly contemporary, and decidedly American, in the business...

...A 7 diD THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 1989...

...Of Allen's previous films, "Oedipus Wrecks" most resembles Zelig and A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy— though in fact it's tidier, less unbridled than the typical Allen comedy...

...Swoosie Kurtz and Mildred Natwick perform admirably as Ceciles harried mere and dotty grandmêm and Keanu Reeves, who plays a pure-hearted young gentleman in love with Cecile, has just the right awkward grace and air of innocence...

...Oedipus Wrecks" is minor Allen (though it rep-resents a definite recovery from his re-cent failures September and Another Woman...

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...Second, some of the puerile smut remains, but it is clearer now that its purpose is not to amuse us but to impress upon us the imma-turity of the protagonists...

...N WAJI -CRT D NA de Valmont, who together engineer the latter's seduction of two beautiful and virtuous young women...

...But Frears's most re-cent film, the infelicitously titled Sammy and Rosie Get Laid (in which we got to see a pudgy Shashi Kapoor coupling sweatily with the unfailingly radiant Claire Bloom), underlines the most lamentable aspects of his work: the obsession with sex and sleaze, the in-judicious embrace of anarchy, the flip-pancy...

...H ow did such an actor end up in such a role...

...And he's supposed to be sleazy...

...But he's also supposed to be able to fool lovely, in-telligent, and refined young ladies into thinking he isn't sleazy, and, beyond that, able to make them fall madly in love with him...

...To be sure, the themes of Dangerous Liaisons are not foreign to him: his films My Beautiful Laun-drette and Prick Up Your Ears offer compelling treatments of decidedly dan-gerous liaisons in post-World War II London, and reflect a lively concern with the nature of love and evil, resent-ment and revenge...

...For the most part, however, Frears's film stands head and shoulders above the Broadway production of Hampton's play...

...Actual-ly, its strongest affinity is with a cou-ple of hilarious post-Kafka short stories which appear in his books With-out Feathers and Side Effects...

...Michelle Pfeiffer and Uma Thurman, in the roles of the victimized Madame de Tourvel and Cecile Volanges, are not only sub-limely beautiful but utterly believable as virtuous eighteenth-century noble-women...

...Neither brings us anywhere near the heart of his character's particular darkness...

...At a time when movie dialogue tends to consist largely of grunts and expletives, and music tracks of raucous noise, this film is at least a pleasure to listen to...

...When I wrote a couple of years ago (TAS, July 1987) about the Broadway production of Christopher Hampton's theatrical adaptation of the novel, I complained about the sitcom-style villainy of the two principals...

...Third, most of the epigrams also remain, but while they seemed the very backbone (to be sure, a very flimsy backbone) of the nerve-rackingly talky play, they feel almost peripheral to the action of this magisterially paced movie...

...His Vicomte simply oozes sleaze...