DANGEROUS LIAISONS
With Glenn Close, John Malkovich, Michelle Pfeiffer, Swoosie Kurtz, Keanu Reeves, Mildred Natwick, and Uma Thurman.
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The screenplay of Dangerous Liaisons, freely adapted by Hampton from his stage version of the book (which I haven’t seen), reportedly reduces the play’s running time by 40 minutes while restoring more of the plot from the novel. The film begins with a sumptuous account of the two leading characters, the Marquise de Merteuil (Glenn Close) and the Vicomte de Valmont (John Malkovich), being wakened and attended to by their many servants in their separate Parisian residences. It hardly seems coincidental that the only theater where the movie is currently playing in Chicago, the Cineplex Odeon at 900 North Michigan, is virtually located in Bloomingdale’s basement, and that one of the audiences I saw the film with, on its Friday night opening, seemed to consist largely of potential Bloomingdale’s customers. The beginning sequence is strictly a consumerist fantasy designed to elicit oohs and aahs from a relatively upscale audience about how luxuriously these characters live, with a certain built-in irony about the extravagance on view that permits an audience to laugh at it and identify with it at the same time. Frears, it should be noted, is an English director with a reputation for being leftist and antiestablishment, most recently because of his direction of My Beautiful Laundrette, Sammy and Rosie Get Laid, and Prick Up Your Ears; but this project is devoted from the outset to flattering and pandering to the same well-to-do art-house audience that flocked to Peter Greenaway’s The Draughtsman’s Contract. This doesn’t necessarily invalidate what the movie sets out to do, but it does circumscribe its intentions in a context that is quite different from Laclos’.
Merteuil and Valmont are certainly the villains here, as they are the villains of the novel, but the movie gives them a centrality and a privileged status in relation to the story that seem quite out of keeping with the strategies of the original. Former lovers who devote most of their time and energy to plotting various seductions out of spite and/or amusement, they form a pact at the beginning of the story that sets the plot in motion.
Valmont and Merteuil are both characters obsessed with power and their own vanity, and part of the brilliance of Laclos’ only novel is its success in making them wholly real as well as wholly evil. (Andre Gide noted of Laclos, “There is no doubt as to his being hand in glove with Satan,” and if making evil real rather than conjectural makes evil more possible in the world outside art, Gide may have a point.) In the novel their reality is largely created by the rounded view that we get of them through letters and accounts from the other major characters, and the reality of these other characters is similarly created through multiple views. It may sound anachronistic to say so, but the novel is essentially constructed on cubist principles, and a truly “faithful” adaptation would probably be something closer to Last Year at Marienbad than to Hampton and Frears’s Masterpiece Theater version.
But the effect this has on the story’s meaning still raises certain doubts. Perhaps the most remarkable letter in the novel, the 81st, is Merteuil’s detailed account to Valmont of the sources of her amorous strategies and attitudes–a fascinating apologia that has distinct feminist overtones concerning the relative powerlessness of women. By extracting a few choice snippets from this letter and introducing them quite early in the film, in the first scene between Merteuil and Valmont, the filmmakers seem to be dispensing with this material rather than honoring it with a more strategic position in the narrative, as Laclos did. The truth of this becomes painfully evident when the movie winds up sentimentalizing Valmont’s eventual comeuppance in order to make his defeat seem more noble–complete with well-placed and carefully timed glycerine tears sliding down his cheeks–while the comeuppance of Merteuil, even though it omits the novel’s detail of her contracting smallpox, allows her no such dignity or sympathy. The net result of these tactics, along with the more drastic reduction of all the other female characters, is to make the movie actively misogynistic in a way the novel is not.
