Dangerous Liaisons is a story about people with too much money, too much time, too much intelligence, and too great a capacity for cruelty. The manipulations which take place within it are so masterful that the story has survived multiple adaptations (as a play, an opera, and several films) without losing any of its edge. Directed by Stephen Frears, this Christopher Hampton penned adaptation is one of the best page to screen (or, rather, page to stage to screen) transitions ever made.

The masters of the plot are the Marquise de Merteuil (Glenn Close) and the Vicomte de Valmont (John Malkovich), old friends (and more) who find pleasure in their ability to ruin the lives and reputations of others while also indulging their own carnal appetites. When a former lover becomes engaged to Cecile de Volanges (Uma Thurman), Merteuil enlists Valmont to seduce the girl, thus tainting the groom’s prize. At first Valmont declines, preferring the challenge of seducing Madame de Tourvel (Michelle Pfeiffer), a prudish guest at the home of his aunt; but when he learns that Cecile’s mother has been corresponding with Madame de Tourvel, warning her about Valmont, he decides to join in the plot after all as a means of exacting revenge on her.

The innocent and childlike Cecile proves little match for Valmont, who easily bends her to his will while Merteuil works on the Chevalier Danceny (Keanu Reeves), the music instructor whom Cecile loves. To keep things interesting, Valmont also continues trying to seduce Madame de Tourvel, betting Merteuil that he can make her fall in love with him. What he doesn’t count on, of course, is that while pretending to be a reformed man to win her heart, he will actually start to reform and fall in love with her. He also doesn’t count on the sheer joy Merteuil will take in making him follow through with their plan by destroying Madame de Tourvel despite his love for her.

One of the striking features of the story, in any of its incarnations, is how little happiness there is within it. Merteuil and Valmont are amused, certainly, by the ease with which they can turn other people into game pieces, but it never seems to make them particularly “happy.” They are essentially miserable human beings who can only be made slightly less miserable by destroying whatever happiness exists around them. In that sense, they are unquestionably victorious, though neither is in a position to celebrate as the story reaches its conclusion.

All things considered, Valmont gets off easily. He’s dead, yes, but in dying he manages to strike the fatal blow against Merteuil, delivering her to a fate worse than death. He orchestrates the revelation of her various plots which causes all those around her to turn on her. She lives but it will be a life of exile, removed from society, a pariah to those she once held under her thumb. Furthermore, she will always be the villain while Valmont’s role will likely be romanticized, another of her victims and one who dies for love. Of the two, Merteuil always had the most to lose because a woman can never be as easily forgiven for transgressions as a man, especially when she actively subverts the “rules” of patriarchal society: “When I came out into society I was 15. I already knew that the role I was condemned to, namely to keep quiet and do what I was told, gave me the perfect opportunity to listen and observe… I consulted the strictest moralists to learn how to appear, philosophers to find out what to think, and novelists to see what I could get away with, and in the end I distilled everything to one wonderfully simple principle: win or die.” In the eyes of society, Merteuil’s greatest crime isn’t that she destroyed lives, but that she found a way to take the rules that were designed to make her submissive and use them to raise herself to a position of power.

The Marquise de Merteuil is one of the most fascinating characters in fiction and she is superbly played by Glenn Close. The final shot of this film is one of the finest examples of acting (and directing) ever captured on screen, a moment of exquisite devastation. The final product leaves little to complain about aside from Keanu Reeves, although to be fair Danceny is such a nothing of a character that even a master thespian would have difficulty breathing much life into him. But this one small flaw can be easily forgiven given the perfection of all the other elements. Dangerous Liaisons is the ideal marriage of the aesthetic and the profound, a film that looks good in every way possible and captures the spirit of the source novel. The end result is a film that’s sharp and beautiful and highly entertaining.

Dangerous Liaisons - A trailer: