Festive Film Fare for Thanksgiving

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

VALMONT

Directed by Milos Forman

Screenplay by Jean-Claude Carriere

Call it by its rightful name, Les Liaisons Dangereuses. Call it Dangerous Liaisons. Call it, if you must, Valmont. But in any case it looks as if we can now call it a day for stage and movie adaptations of Pierre-Ambroise-Francois Choderlos de Laclos's intricate, instructive novel of sexual gamesmanship among the 18th century French aristocracy. For Milos Forman and Jean-Claude Carriere, while fiddling with the plot of this deliciously nasty tale, have studiously embalmed its spirit. Valmont arrives stiffened by the elegant, inert formalism of Forman's direction, and chilled by Carriere's all too sober respect for his source and by their mutual determination to apply modern psychological understanding to the behavior of the principal figures.

The script is almost clinically clear about why the Marquise de Merteuil (Annette Bening) and the Vicomte de Valmont (Colin Firth) embark on a campaign to debauch a 15-year-old virgin, Cecile de Volanges (Fairuza Balk). The older woman is gripped by temporary insanity because she loves the man who intends to marry the adolescent. The vicomte too has his excuses. He is possessed by a passionate nature, the ill effects of which, it is implied, are also temporary. Give the kid some time, and he will probably turn out to be an admirable citizen. Indeed, his second amorous campaign -- to bed a virtuous young wife, Madame de Tourvel (Meg Tilly) -- is not presented as idle and amoral womanizing but as proof of his capacity for authentic emotion. Too bad he has what we now are fond of calling "an intimacy problem," and, as a result, this affair and ultimately his life come to a bad and premature end.

How could anyone think it helpful to impose upon the behavior of a long-lost era and a vanished social class the wisdom of modern Pop psychology? It prevents the actors from tearing into their roles with the black comic gusto that Glenn Close and John Malkovich brought to their feverish performances in Dangerous Liaisons last year. But besides spoiling the fun, this approach / blurs the work's value as a cautionary tale, capable of reminding us that motiveless malignity is a potent force in every age and one that not even Freud -- let alone humanistically inclined moviemakers -- can explain away. R.S.