On Screen: Games of Corruption

As the last shot of Dangerous Liaisons faded to black at the close of the screening I attended, the audience gave a collective sigh of release. I hasten to note that a sigh of release is not at all the same thing as a sigh of relief, such as one might emit at the end of a boring movie. Dangerous Liaisons is anything but boring. What I heard was rather close to the sound people make as they reach the end of a rough, perilous journey. Such a journey isn’t boring; it may be stimulating or abrasive or even soul-shaping. But one isn’t sorry it’s over.

This film is based on the 1782 novel by the French artillery officer, Choderlos de Laclos. Two things fascinated Laclos: family happiness and military tactics. (Years after writing Les Liaisons Dangereuses, he enjoyed an entirely successful and loving marriage, wrote a book on battle strategy that reportedly still engages students of military science, became a general under Napoleon, and, just before his death, was planning a book about conjugal bliss.) In his novel, Laclos shows how two reptilian strategists of sex, the Marquise de Merteuil and the Vicomte de Valmont, join forces to destroy two families and to abort the possibilities of at least one happy marriage. Since the novel is epistolary in form and the bulk of the correspondence consists of the missives in which these two human devils egg each other on, give advice, chide one another for tardiness, and lovingly describe each crime committed, the reader cannot escape feeling encircled, engulfed by evil. Even the most virtuous actions of the more benevolent characters are, in the main, perceived through a gauze of evil since these actions are described to us by enthusiastic thwarters of virtue.

The action is chess-like, if one can conceive of chess pieces shedding tears and blood. The Marquise de Merteuil, wanting to punish an errant lover, the Comte de Gercourt, commands an ex-lover, Valmont, to seduce and deflower Gercourt’s adolescent fiancee, Cecile. Valmont scorns the task as unchallenging to a champion Don Juan like himself and sets his sights on a woman of strict morals and religious fervor, the happily married Madame de Tourvel. As Valmont puts it in the film: “I want her to continue to believe [in God] … and still not be able to stop herself.” But, momentarily foiled in his pursuit of the older woman by the mother of the virgin, Valmont does Merteuil’s bidding ostensibly to revenge himself on the girl’s interfering parent but also to show the Marquise that his powers of seduction have only momentarily failed him. He then returns to his pursuit of de Tourvel, succeeds in bedding her but, almost unconsciously, falls in love with her.

Then he makes a huge mistake. He reveals his newly discovered capacity for love and compassion to the Marquise. She taunts him into abandoning the vulnerable de Tourvel. But when he continues to show traces of compassion (mere backsliding to Merteuil), the Marquise betrays him to society by using the self-revealing letters he’s written her. Before he dies in a duel, Valmont dishes Merteuil with the letters she has written him. (One of the film’s best touches: when Valmont, lying wounded on the field of honor, brings forth Merteuil’s letters from his tunic, they are blood-soaked.) In her review of an earlier film adaptation of the book, Pauline Kael succinctly describes the story’s precipitous conclusion:

They [Merteuil and Valmont] were both talented at long, drawn-out military maneuvers, but when it comes to the passions of war, they finish each other off as viciously and destructively as if they had never heard of finesse.

The movie is stylistically more erratic than the book. There are several lapses. Successful in his seduction of the married lady, the movie Valmont goes bounding up Merteuil’s staircase while bellowing, “Success! Success!”. That is something the cold, controlled chevalier would never do. To underline class distinction, Valmont’s manservant speaks with a coarse Scots accent. How can this have its proper effect when Valmont himself speaks with an equally coarse American accent? More damaging throughout is the relative adventitiousness of the letter-writing in the movie as compared to its indispensability in the book. As the novel’s Penguin translator, P.W.K. Stone, puts it:

Each [letter] is an incident in the plot. One gives rise to another, and all are written with some definite purpose of the writer’s in view. Thus the artificiality of the method is scarcely perceptible.

This is not true of the occasional letter-writing in the movie. When the movie Valmont produces the Marquise’s correspondence, we must simply assume that enough of Merteuil’s guilt is in them for her to be defeated. By contrast, when the book’s Valmont produces the correspondence, we know how damaging these missives are because they constitute a substantial portion of the book we have just read.

But, on the other hand, the movie is less stifling, less claustrophobic than the book. We don’t have Merteuil and Valmont hissing in our ears all the time. As witty as they are, the correspondence between these evil twins dominates the book a little too easily. The virtuous characters all write in the same flowery, convention-ridden style, full of sentimental locutions and breathless apostrophes. Too many alases. Merteuil and Valmont write boldly, nakedly, with self-delighting and reader-delighting effrontery. It’s part of Laclos’ meaning, of course, that in a society where virtue has been codified to the point of ossification, the virtuous, no matter how sincere, tend to speak by rote, while outlaws are free to find their own (poisonous) voices. In the movie, however, no matter how conventionally the virtuous speak, they can communicate pathos and sincerity with their eyes and gestures. They touch us more directly than their literary counterparts because they move through scenes that aren’t being described by their sneering victimizers.

As an equivalent of the seduction strategies meticulously described in the novel, director Stephen Frears gives us clever, sometimes funny choreography. While in the book Valmont simply says that he tossed a letter into the lap of the teenaged Cecile and then describes her embarrassed reaction, the movie Valmont devises a strategy to distract the attention of everyone else in the room before he delivers the note. The results energize the incident and show us how close to farce Valmont’s very unfunny intentions take him.

Better still are the scenes of dialogue between the various combinations of victims and victimizers, staged by Frears with economy and subdued menace. The actors sit, stand, lean, turn profile and full-front in a variety of piquant ways at those precise moments when some word or phrase of Christopher Hampton’s arch yet sinewy dialogue needs a physical accent. Example: when the recently deflowered Cecile pleads with her false friend Merteuil for advice, the two women are sitting in chairs facing one another but with Cecile leaning forward and looking up beseechingly at the older woman, whose hat partially conceals her already guarded expression. When it is the Marquise’s turn to speak, she removes the hat but stands, turns away from the girl and speaks to herself in a mirror while saying that a woman can regret the loss of her virginity only once. Then the two sit on a settee as equals while Merteuil gives Cecile corrupting advice. The two are equals now, or rather will be soon, once Cecile has fallen down to Merteuil’s moral level.

A much more poignant example: while begging Tourvel to surrender to him, Valmont pursues the woman down an orchard path. Tourvel runs toward us in medium close-up. Valmont is close behind her, but constantly shifts from one side to another, pleading first in one ear and then the other. Much later in the film, Tourvel, now the conquest of Valmont, is following a footman to her lover’s room where he, we know, is trifling with a prostitute. Heartbreakingly, Tourvel, in her haste to be with her loved one, reproduces Valmont’s earlier pursuing movement, constantly shifting from one side of the footman to the other, finally dashing ahead. The first pursuit was that of predator closing on prey. Now prey hastens to predator. A dreadful revolution has occurred in Tourvel’s soul.

But several spiritual turn-abouts take place in this tale, and sheer visual design cannot convey all of them. The quality of the acting is crucial and in this department Dangerous Liaisons has many strengths and failings, though it is not so much that strong players are mingled with inept ones as that nearly all the actors give striking but severely flawed performances.

To take the supporting players first: Uma Thurman as Cecile is a paradox: excellently and accurately costumed and coiffed, she moves and speaks at first like an American sorority princess. But later, unlaced and mussed by Valmont, with the camera focused on her face as she listens to her lover’s corrupting pillow talk (he informs her that he was her mother’s lover and gets her to laugh at the news), Thurman does accurately embody the girl’s incipient depravity. As Cecile’s mother and as her innocent suitor, Swoosie Kurtz and Keanu Reeves show a firm understanding of their roles but are hampered by their too obviously North American accents. As Valmont’s doting but clear-sighted aunt, the veteran Mildred Natwick is simply perfect. Listen to the vocal arc she gives to the sentence (addressed to the despairing Tourvel): “The longer I live the more I see how little the world changes.” In the downward slide of the last five words we hear all the compassion of 70 years of experienced and observed pain. That is great diction in the service of great acting.

But listen to the way John Malkovich (as Valmont) commands a servant to spy on Tourvel, “Find out whom she sees, what she eats, if she sleeps,” and you will understand the limitations of this talented actor. He simply cannot give to the cleverly marshaled noun clauses the whiplash authority that the line cries out for. Imagine Olivier speaking that sentence and the different inflections he would give to each verb. Malkovich simply speaks fast and fails to color the words. His slouchy carriage conveys not so much aristocratic ease as plain old bad posture, a gracelessness out of place in a Valmont trained from an early age to fence, ride, dance, and dance attendance. Furthermore, I doubt if he is anyone’s idea of an irresistable Don Juan. On the other hand, Malkovich does use his long, ugly but interesting face with precision and a certain wit. Even if his delivery of individual lines isn’t first-rate, he does know how to counterpoint them with a twist of the mouth, an arched eyebrow, a cobra stare. He can match David Letterman smirk for smirk. He is quite good in his final scene on the field of honor as he makes us understand that he is only toying with his young opponent in order to hasten his own death. We can feel Valmont dying even before the final sword thrust is delivered.

Glenn Close plays Merteuil as an animated porcelain cat. She overdoes the gelid smugness (not enough venom leaks through), but she is convincingly aristocratic, convincingly self-enamored, believably ruthless. Close understands at least one axiom of Merteuil’s character: for the Marquise, there is nothing worse than the spontaneous expression of feeling. When Merteuil is condemned by society and publicly booed out of an opera house, she turns away from the crowd with great dignity, walks at a measured pace out of her box, and then . . . stumbles. This almost imperceptible stumble marks the beginning of the end of her obsessively controlled career.

The main flaw of the film is the lack of steepness in the moral descent of Madame de Tourvel. Tourvel is the virtuous counterpart of the pair who undo her. By curbing the political powers of the nobility, Louis XIV forced aristocrats to find other channels in which to release their energies. Just as Merteuil and Valmont use their unlimited leisure to pursue the ruin of others, Tourvel fulfills her own charitable nature by doing good works. What is so infernally clever about Valmont’s seduction strategy is that this libertine succeeds in making himself one of Tourvel’s charity projects. When he pretends that he is falling into suicidal despair born of unrequited love, Tourvel, horrified by the threat that he will commit the supreme sin of suicide, risks her own damnation to keep him from hell. In Madame de Tourvel, Laclos makes the oxymoron “saintly sinner” ring true because her sin is, to her deceived mind, a moral martyrdom. In this aspect of the story, Laclos anticipates Graham Greene’s fictional speculations about the neighborliness of sin and virtue, salvation and damnation. And, as in The End of the Affair, the machinations of the male finally collapse before the artlessness of the pursued female. Valmont finds himself addicted to Tourvel —not to her body alone, but to the force of her entire being. This brings about his own downfall at the hands of Merteuil.

This aspect of the novel is muted in the movie for two reasons. First, Laclos felt no need to demonstrate Tourvel’s virtue in concrete actions because his audience was well familiar with women of her moral bent. But filmmakers creating for a twentieth-century audience should have felt free to demonstrate her piety by other means than simply showing her in church. Since the evil of the villains is so amply dramatized both in novel and film through word and deed, we needed some moral counterweight from the movie’s Tourvel. I’m not sure that a viewer who hasn’t read the book can be sufficiently aware of how good Tourvel is before she falls to Valmont’s siege.

Of her sweetness he will have no doubt, for Michelle Pfeiffer can raise any viewer’s calorie count with one upturned glance. But she hasn’t taken Tourvel’s full measure. In her virtue, Tourvel should be as formidable as Merteuil is in her evil. Both women should be forceful, confidently feminine, authoritative. But compared to Close, Pfeiffer seems too mousey, too timorous, too humble. When she falls to Valmont, we feel that a small animal has been snared rather than a forceful paragon, whose seeming inviolability compels Valmont to use all his wiles. The imbalance of actresses makes this a lopsided movie.

Nevertheless, the skillful staging of the final scenes gets Laclos’ ironic point across: though evil can corrupt goodness, this very corruption is a form of contact. And, once this contact is made, evil may be purged by goodness even as goodness is wounded by evil.

It’s odd that a book burned by the public hangman should be so fiercely moral. It’s even odder that a film adapted from this book should find an audience partly by being advertised as an “Amadeus with sex,” only to grip that same audience not with displays of bursting bodices but with a sinister, stern authority. That sigh of release I mentioned at the beginning of this review was also a sigh of gratitude: gratitude for the film’s power, gratitude for being released from that power so that one could return to the pleasant, unjudged mediocrity of everyday life. And, perhaps, gratitude for a film that, though concerned with evil, betrays no smirk on the face of its creators.

Author

  • Richard Alleva

    At the time he wrote this review, Richard Alleva was a free-lance writer living in Washington D.C. He still works as a film critic for publications such as Commonweal today.

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