Cruel Intentions
By Jonathan Rosenbaum
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The last two adaptations, both in English and in period costume and settings, came out ten years ago, a few months apart. Dangerous Liaisons was an adaptation of Christopher Hampton’s play directed by Stephen Frears and starring Glenn Close, John Malkovich, Michelle Pfeiffer, and Keanu Reeves; Valmont was adapted by Jean-Claude Carriere, directed by Milos Forman, and starred Annette Bening, Colin Firth, Meg Tilly, and Fairuza Balk. Almost three decades earlier we had Roger Vadim’s contemporary French version, now called Dangerous Liaisons 1960, written by Roger Vailland and Claude Brule and starring Jeanne Moreau, Gerard Philipe, Annette Vadim, and a very young Jean-Louis Trintignant.
None of the movie adaptations so far has had the guts to make the story and its implications quite as harsh as they are in the novel, which was published only seven years before the French Revolution and can be read in part as a social indictment that makes that upheaval seem logical if not quite inevitable. All four movies start off as if they intend to be just as scary as the novel but then wind up simplifying the issues, either by letting a doomed sympathetic character survive (as in Cruel Intentions) or by sentimentalizing the motives or the fates of the more evil characters (as in the other three movies). Curiously, the most puritanical and in some ways the silliest of the four is the Vadim, made on the cusp of the “swinging 60s” by the alleged libertine of the French New Wave and populated by jet-setters strenuously trying to seem wicked; it’s typical of the project’s wrongheadedness that it makes the two scheming lead characters (Moreau and Philipe) husband and wife rather than former lovers. By making them stepsister and stepbrother, Cruel Intentions tries to be wicked in a different way; they haven’t been lovers in the past, but the stepsister promises sex to the stepbrother, who’s been lusting after her for ages, in exchange for carrying out her revenge plot.
