Valmont (1989)

Sometimes I write rather loosely, do I not, so on this occasion I am toying with a more essayistic approach which I suspect will be a passing fad to the mutual relief (or common relief, as Fowler would say) of the author and his readers. The object of this fine writing will be Valmont, an adaptation of Dangerous Liaisons from an interesting and - to begin the flourishes - heady collaboration between the director of One Flew Over A Cuckoo’s Nest and the screenwriter for Belle de Jour and The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, subversively doing Dangerous Liaisons against itself.  They clearly don’t like the book and redo the whole thing in the polar opposite genre – get ready for Dangerous Liaisons as a dry comedy with some occasional slapstick. You may wonder what that’s like. Well, here’s how I’d put it:

Milos Forman’s film of Dangerous Liaisons can be slightly jolting if you know any other version of the story – it’s quite an imperious display of the auteur’s prerogative to turn a bleak romantic tragedy into a comedy with a happy ending and, to go even further, happy for the character usually cast as diabolical. Roger Vadim’s Les Liaisons Dangereuse (1959) or Roger Kumble's (immortal name) Cruel Intentions (1999) move the original story roughly intact into the present day but that is a merely cosmetic decision. What Forman does is closer to Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers in playing actively against its own source material. He stamps his own libertarian sensibility on what was once a denunciation of libertines and ruthlessly discards Laclos wherever the Frenchman would get in his way. He and his screen-writer Jean Claude Carriere are, like vulgar arrivistes interloping at court, all brash swagger and no deference while outwardly aping the established customs; they drastically reconfigure the material however it suits them, which is almost always at odds with how it suited Laclos. 

The finished work is, like the characters, flagrantly unfaithful and gives the impression they think only a boring bourgeois snob would object to their aristocratic dilettante dabbling and diddling. Forman is a masterful director so, naturally, it’s a constant swooning pleasure just to look at - it cost twice as much as the previous adaptation and it wouldn’t be difficult to guess that – but it’s so utterly unlike the novel, you have to brace yourself for the iconoclastic sabotage. What would Dangerous Liaisons be like with all the sleazy nastiness taken out of it? It would be Valmont. And this is the very thing that piques our attention to this film which, in effect, works as speculative literary criticism: a suggestion that the same story without the moralising might be more morally true. 

The previous adaptation was Stephen Frears’ Dangerous Liaisons (1988), technically from Christopher Hampton’s play rather than the novel itself, and because they’re chronologically right on top of each other, anyone who has seen them both will inevitably draw a stark comparison. They show Cecile’s age more accurately in this version so Forman has to be marginally more circumspect about Valmont’s seduction of her than Frears (who shows Uma Thurman stripping off and revelling in the perversions she learns) but then Forman is a lot more laid-back about everything else here. The stifling sense of doom that attracts Frears is repellent to Forman, like it smacks of reactionary Puritanism or perhaps totalitarianism. In other words – fuck Laclos, fuck the system. Alas, my prose is still not immaculately polished. 

As the novel tells it, two aristocrats in 18^th century France, psychopaths who seem to share a lingering affection for each other, see nothing wrong in ruining people’s lives for their amusement, and even admire each other for the skill with which they do it, until one day, something terrible happens - Valmont meets someone who makes him feel human (worse, he has fallen for a bourgeois housewife); but this tears apart the settled inhumanity of his relationship with Merteuil, causing her in turn to realise she has feelings for Valmont. Love is spreading among them like a lethal virus, laying waste. The final disaster unfolds because by now the emotional capacities of the central couple are so shrivelled and stunted by their poisonous lives that they can only express the depth of their feelings for each other by mutual destruction. If you’ve seen (or, preposterously, read) Dangerous Liaisons, then this will be familiar. It doesn’t prepare you for Valmont.

Here the title character is played by Colin Firth – not Alan Rickman, not Jeremy Irons, not Charles Dance or Malcolm McDowell, all reasonable guesses considering Frears cast Malkovich. No, Colin Firth. For good reason – no longer a chilling genius of misogynistic contempt, Valmont is now a bumbling joke, a big overgrown kid, brimming with energy and life-force. He’s more familiar to us - the kind of cocky blokey womaniser who will just bounce up to a girl he fancies in the street, or in this case by a lake, and start chatting her up to see how far he gets. He lives his life on the off chance of success. When forced to confront the consequences of his own behaviour, he looks dejected, like he’s getting told off and resents it. At one point, de Tourvel asks him why he keeps pursuing her, in response to which Valmont stomps away muttering “I don’t even know”, apparently annoyed by his own confusion – from Malkovich, we would take this as a ruse, a calculated part of the act, but Firth’s delivery is quite frank. He is, in this respect, an emotional idiot, but for the audience this is Forman’s coup – should our complacently censorious attitude to Valmont be upended? What if we, while we withhold our approval, found him pitiful?

Annette Benning could hardly be more different than Glenn Close in her role. She’s revelling in her glib manner, taunting everyone around her with girlish giggles, smugly amused by her own insincerity, but the smirk is always held in contrast with her eyes and their predatory expectancy; superficially, a spoiled brat who, like Valmont, never had to grow up - but with the marked difference that we can always tell there are machinations in her choices. She forms a perfect portrait of juvenile cunning, with shadows of duplicity in her smile and flashes of strategy glinting in her stare. Benning’s emphasis on femininity lets her combine that type of facetiously civilised button-pushing with flirtatious playfulness – she could be, convincingly, and unlike Close’s version, an accomplished seductress. Also unlike Close’s version, this Merteuil seems happy. More than just happy - she’s having the time of her life.  

Just as Merteuil is now more annoyingly sneaky than she is sinister, and Valmont is more bewildered than sick, the film is more open and cinematic than Frears’ cloistered stagebound approach and at times seems deceptively innocuous. These are now trivial liaisons, we might complain (or agree). The jaunty harpsichord score says it all – the oppressive atmosphere, the tightening web, is banished. Benning, Firth and Forman treat the plot as larks and japes that happen to end in his death, also played for dark humour and, in a final insult to him, not even shown on-screen. The flippancy undercuts the callousness. Everything’s breezy and snappy and, so it seems, needlessly simple. But is seeing them as intrinsically silly people less appropriate then investing them with dark chilling grandeur? On even the lightest acquaintance with aristocracy, derision seems like the healthier attitude. 

Only Meg Tilly plays it straight, and frequently brings a counterpoint of honesty to the film, but nonetheless the script removes the pious moralism that was the definitive trait of her equivalent in the novel (and of Pfeiffer’s version of the character). Here, she’s delighted by Firth’s chirpy frivolity the first time she meets him; so innocent, she doesn’t even know enough to be more stand-offish with him, though she deftly maintains her boundaries, which makes her much less fragile than Pfeiffer’s portrayal. Her objections are a matter of decorum and embarrassment, whereas Pfeiffer’s De Tourvel fears for her soul (and is destroyed); Tilly’s never loses her dignity – her expression of love is so heartfelt that it’s Valmont who loses the high ground and she takes his later rebuff with commendably stoic resignation. But this isn’t quite the same as lowering what’s at stake for her – Forman instead returns to the centre the earthly social risks and costs displaced by Frears’ interest in (mere) religious dread.  

So we can choose. From the English director, a pair of uncoiling vipers slowly circle the startled mouse of Pfeiffer; or, from the exiled Czech, a puppyish Firth toys with a kittenish but wary Tilly while a sly, slinky Benning prowls around them, purring all the while. In both, they present urbane exteriors, but in one they’re seething, in the other simply unruffled. Forman’s greatest weapon in all this is Benning and, accordingly, of all the differences between the two adaptations, the most crucial is that Valmont’s Merteuil avoids an ultimate reckoning. Not as a dark irony but as a challenge to us – why, Forman seems to ask, would you want her to suffer? 

The ending of Dangerous Liaisons is the consecutive annihilation of the principal characters, terminating in the social and psychological ruin of Merteuil, presented clearly enough as her comeuppance. Forman switches all the weight of judgement on to Valmont. Frears makes him a martyr to love, sacrificed on the altar of Merteuil’s malice, making her the witch to be burned; Forman makes him a clown in his last moments, a buffoon simply outmatched by his former lover; in Valmont, the joke’s on everyone except her. She’s the devious minx who gets away scot free and knowingly watches the suckers celebrate the charade of the fairy-tale wedding. The loss of Valmont might be at most a minor bummer for her but, if so, she’ll get over it, no biggie. Her revenge is complete and her life is in balance; she could almost ride off into the sunset. Now it’s her gaze that casts the decisive judgement on high society and not, as in Frears, the other way around.

Letting her end completely unscathed is aggressively opposite to the novel. Most obviously, this offers an imperious middle finger to all the other characters and their world, but maybe it’s something more than that; maybe genuine sympathy for her has crept up on the director. Or admiration. Maybe Forman, coming from communist Czechoslovakia, feels a deep empathy with her artful subterfuges within a repressive society, and prefers her as an anti-hero who wins rather than a villain brought down for daring to break the facade. Where Forman came from, scandalous breaches of the social code could get you shot, and the fate she meets in other versions may have had just too heavy a connotation for him to feel she deserved it (he has, after all, greatly reduced the character’s monstrousness). So let there be a path to victory, through passing secret letters, making secret plots and the ingenuity of a secretly defiant individual who knows the game well enough to cheat the system from within. 

Maybe. Or, maybe, Forman has just fallen for Merteuil, and now he’s her most gullible lover.