Screen:
O'Brien, Tom
SEDUCTION WITH VENGEANCE FREARS'S 'DANGEROUS LIAISONS' Dangerous Liaisons is a colorfully costumed, beautifully designed production. It features another strong acting performance by Glenn Close as...
...Perhaps the film is limited by its source...
...It has the advan-tage of making the virtuous and virginal its targets of seduc-tion, immediately prejudicing a modern audience in favor of the elegant villains...
...TOM O'BRIEN...
...Dangerous Liaisons is a big hit...
...As fiery as some of these lines are, her naughty bon-mots and exchanges with Malkovich move re-peatedly over the same ground...
...To maintain his honor, he aims to topple a virtuous married woman, the Marquise de Tourvel (beautifully played by Michelle Pfeiffer, in perhaps her best acting ever...
...Oddly, she doesn't see how private and selfish her "feminism" is, and that women mostly suffer from it...
...The title has been translated to avoid frightening off American audiences...
...This time, she's not the mad, out-of-control, would-be lover of Fatal Attraction...
...It is too late in coming...
...Valmont and Meurteuil like to use sex to gain power, or at least to ruin others' self-esteem...
...Laclos also may have, in the original, developed an important twist, which the movie lame-ly carries out...
...Pine-tooth-comb debates over which is better-love, revenge, betrayal, or cruelty-seem long-winded and abstract, betraying a novel with very few ideas...
...Such a one-dimensional being, even outfitted in the finest costumes, still needs depth, or inflection, to prolong interest...
...He goes about his' 'work" in a dedicated but humdrum manner, without the extra dimension an actor like Ian McKellan or Jeremy Irons would have added...
...Pleasure in watching such a contrived contest is limited...
...To Valmont, such a dalliance is a small challenge...
...Close gets irked that any other woman could compel loyalty (which she herself won't satisfy...
...perhaps not...
...the game is sexual chess, but only in dry end variations...
...In part this results from a kind of dry, mechanical super-ficiality in the characters...
...In Amadeus, Milos Forman used materials from the period of Laclos to fashion another diabolical tale of greater power and weight...
...even wickedness loses interest when it moves in such well-worn ruts...
...All the force in the film rests in diabolism, not the way the devils are finally hoist with their own petard...
...Close prompts him to seduce a young engaged woman she knows (Cecile des Volanges, played by Una Thurman...
...This emphasis is trendily intellectual today...
...But here, ironically, only Malkovich succeeds, in an affecting, final duel...
...Delight in diabolism, or sympathy for the devil, is a traditional (and often legitimate) feeling that art evokes for purposes of vicarious participation...
...she wants vengeance on an ex-lover who once left her and now plans to marry the innocent Volanges...
...In the film, this irony could have been provocative had this love ever been genuinely projected by both main characters...
...Laclos, author of the 1782 novel, was at least original...
...The film ranks near the top of the box office charts...
...but costume drama is always a risky sell...
...Both are destroyed, in short, by the power of the love they demeaned...
...It features another strong acting performance by Glenn Close as a deliriously evil meanie...
...One never believes that Close in any (even perverse) way loved him, so the final plot twists lack power...
...Malkovich attains his goals, but only to find himself in love with the virtuous Pfeiffer...
...Dangerous Liaisons was produced to make money, to be sure...
...It left me bored...
...Pas-de-deux seductions begin, united by one key question: if Valmont "manages" bom women, when and how will he get satisfaction from the marquise...
...But this film is exceptional because its deck is so stacked, its means so taw-dry, its diabolism so conformist...
...Feelings, even perverse ones, are drowned out by words...
...Lack of fidelity isn't the problem...
...And John Malkovich, as Close's ally, the Vicomte de Valmont, falters several times early in the film...
...Valmont thinks he has a reputation to keep up, so he dedicates himself to harder and harder tasks of seduction to certify his stature as wickedest man alive...
...She accepts the bet, on condition he beds Volanges as well...
...The problem is that this radiant but stony film leaves no lasting resonance...
...Like his close contemporary, De Sade, Laclos focused on the dark side of human nature forgotten by the late Enlightenment and early, optimistic Romanticism...
...We'll know next winter: Milos Forman (director also of Hair, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, and Amadeus) is now completing his version of Laclos's Liaisons Dangereuses, titled Valmont...
...When Close declares this impossible, he challenges her to bet her honor-or rather a night in bed-on his success with Tourvel...
...In addition, Malkovich never quite gives weight to his elegant Satan...
...he also orchestrated convincing, genuinely chilling irony against irony...
...What makes this material easier- and compels sophisticated attention-is its cliched, conven-tional irony...
...she's in control of everyone else as the Machiavellian Marquise de Meurteuil of Choderlos Lac-los's Liaisons Dangereuses...
...The screenplay-written by Chris Hampton, who wrote the recent Broadway hit-and the spirit of the film, as directed by Stephen Frears, are close to Laclos's original...
...Calling herself a "virtuoso of deceit," she sees life as a "war between love and virtue" and lives by the slogan, "win or die...
...Close at least has motive, desire for vengeance against men for their dominance over women...
...Gorgeous, opulent settings in French chateaus make such dialogues easier to take, but can't relieve their tedium...
Vol. 116 • March 1989 • No. 5
